Ultimate Guide to Partnering™https://ultimateguidetopartnering.com
PodCastFri, 13 Jul 2018 01:20:51 +0000en-US
hourly
1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.2.1https://i1.wp.com/ultimateguidetopartnering.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/cropped-vincemenzione-6.jpg?fit=32%2C32&ssl=1Ultimate Guide to Partnering™https://ultimateguidetopartnering.com
3232https://ultimateguidetopartnering.com/feed/podcast/…with Microsoft and other Technology Giants<br />
<br />
Welcome to a podcast to inspire partners to connect and thrive in the age of digital transformation. The Ultimate Guide to Partnering™ is your “go to destination” to learn from technology leaders in Redmond and elsewhere how to best engage, align and execute to grow your business.<br />
Featuring industry leaders from the technology giants and partners that have gotten it right our goal is to deconstruct the success formulas and best practices of great partnerships.<br />
Rather than a lengthy blog post or video format that you need to consume from your desk during your already busy day, these podcasts will be quick, consumable and hopefully useful segments you can listen to when and where you want. <br />
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Our goal is to inform, connect and inspire you!<br />Vince Menzione - Technology Industry Sales and Partner ExecutivecleanVince Menzione - Technology Industry Sales and Partner Executivevincemenzione@gmail.comvincemenzione@gmail.com (Vince Menzione - Technology Industry Sales and Partner Executive)Ultimate Guide to Partnering™Ultimate Guide to Partnering™https://unofficialguidetopartnering.com/wp-content/uploads/powerpress/vincemenzione_7.jpghttps://ultimateguidetopartnering.com
TV-G#60 – Spotlighting An Innovative Solution to Cloud Risk, Complexity, and Cost.https://ultimateguidetopartnering.com/2018/07/12/60-spotlighting-an-innovative-solution-to-cloud-risk-complexity-and-cost/
https://ultimateguidetopartnering.com/2018/07/12/60-spotlighting-an-innovative-solution-to-cloud-risk-complexity-and-cost/#respondFri, 13 Jul 2018 01:20:51 +0000https://ultimateguidetopartnering.com/?p=1590For this episode of the podcast leading up to Microsoft Inspire, I spotlight a Microsoft partner introducing and showcasing their new innovative solution at the event. My guest for this episode of the podcast is Vadim Vladimirskiy. Vadim is the CEO and Founder of Nerdio. a Microsoft partner with a long tradition in delivering value-added managed … Continue reading "#60 – Spotlighting An Innovative Solution to Cloud Risk, Complexity, and Cost."

For this episode of the podcast leading up to Microsoft Inspire, I spotlight a Microsoft partner introducing and showcasing their new innovative solution at the event.

My guest for this episode of the podcast is Vadim Vladimirskiy. Vadim is the CEO and Founder of Nerdio. a Microsoft partner with a long tradition in delivering value-added managed services that have developed an innovative platform that reduces the risk, complexity, and cost for service providers delivering cloud services.

In this episode, Vadim and I discuss his experiences and insights as a managed service provider, the best practices his organization brings to this new innovative product offering, why other Microsoft partners should work with Nerdio and where partners can meet he and the team at Microsoft Inspire, July 15th to the 19th in Las Vegas Nevada.

And if you are coming to Inspire, please join me in the Commons Theater on Wednesday, July 18th at 2:30 for a special session where I’ll share “What they don’t teach working with Microsoft”.

Vince: I’m excited to have you as a guest on Ultimate Guide to Partnering. You and I have gotten to know each other pretty well over the last several months working on your Go-to-Market plan with Microsoft. I’m glad you could join today to discuss your company, its value proposition, and your personal and professional journey. So, welcome.

Vadim: Thanks so much. I’m really glad to be here, and thanks for having me on.

Vince: Can you begin by telling our listeners a little bit about Nerdio, and how you got started.

Vadim: Absolutely. We started Nerdio back in 2005. Initially, we were an online backup company in the market that was pretty new back in those days and then quickly evolved into a managed services provider, an MSP, that was offering a very unique hosted IT type of a service.

We were using cloud-type IT before cloud was The Cloud, so initially, we were offering services around RDS and remote desktop services, and terminal services, and then eventually transitioned to more of a VDI-type of technology, and have created a business that has hundreds of companies all around the world using our services.

Vince: For our listeners who don’t know, how do you define MSP or managed service provider?

Vadim: I guess the easiest way to think about it is an IT services company that takes care of either some or all of the IT needs of a particular organization. These IT needs typically include things like: monitoring of the IT system, fixing any problems as they arise, providing tech support to users, help desk, and providing consulting services, and things like that. Usually these services are provided as a month subscription by the MSP or the managed services provider.

Vince: I’ve heard you talk about IT as a service. For our listeners, what is IT as a service? Can you explain that to us?

Vadim: Sure, sure. The easiest way in my mind to think about IT as a services is as a superset of other as a service technology. Think about software as a service, or infrastructure as a service, or backup as a service. IT as a service is really something that combines them all together in a very cohesive way to create a complete IT environment that’s typically hosted in the cloud, and then managed by an MSP.

If you think about a typical technology stack, IT technology stack at a typical organization, you sort of have these very common components that almost every system or every organization uses, right? At the core you have some technologies such as desktops, and servers, and productivity, and collaboration, such as Office 365. But then you also have things like security, backup, disaster recovery, those types of technologies that all go into making a good IT system that provides users what they need, and also protects the organizations’ data.

Typically, what MSPs do, they take that technology stack and they layer their own services on top of those. Those can include monitoring, as I mentioned, maybe line of business, application support and development, maybe some virtual CIO, or IT strategy consulting services, help desk, those types of things. If you put that all into a package, and you offer it to an end-user organization as a complete sort of IT-in-a-box hosted in the cloud, when we talk about IT as a service that’s what we refer to.

Vince: I’ve been chronically this amazing transformation. It’s been going on in all industries, and it seems to be happening fast, but a lot of small organizations are struggling, and they’re not taking full advantage of the cloud, and the potential the cloud offers their business.

Can you tell our listeners what Nerdio for Azure, NFA, as we also refer to it, what role it plays here?

Vadim: Definitely. If you think about how small and mid-size organizations typically consume technology, and in IT in particular, is, they generally don’t go out there and have the internal resources and capacity to just buy it and build it themselves. They generally rely on someone like their service provider, like their MSP, or maybe their inside IT team to kind of guide them as to what the right solution for them is, and how to leverage the cloud.

The challenge we’re seeing out there in the market is that a lot of MSPs have an established business model where they’re kind of monetizing an existing way of doing business by reselling hardware, or installing it, managing it, maintaining it, and providing all the services that go along with it. Then going into the cloud for them, because they’re the ones who are driving the end customers buying decision, is really a significant shift in their business model. They, in the process of trying to evolve and transform their business model, they run into various challenges in being able to leverage the cloud and being able to do that.

Some of these challenges revolve around the perceived costs, or the perceived higher cost of offering the same managed IT services in the cloud, as compared to doing that on-premise like they’re used to. There’s also this perceived challenge around complexity. It’s both technical complexity of knowing all the new methodologies, and new technologies, and components of these clouds that are fairly robust and big, but it’s also the complexity of figuring out how to price this, and how to evolve their service offering to their customer, and being able to package everything together and provide it with enough margin to make sense for them to keep running their business that way.

Then, also, there’s a significant amount of perceived business risk in a sense that, when you buy a piece of hardware, and you put it in someone’s office, or in the data center, you know exactly what you’ve spent, and now any income that results, any revenue that results from those services has a fixed cost associated with it.

In the cloud, where costs are really usage consumption-based, there is less predictability around how much a cloud service is necessarily gonna cost on a month-to-month basis, which leads a lot of service providers to kind of be concerned about offering cloud services without passing that risk onto their end customer. And their end customer is really looking to them and says, “Hey, you are the expert. I’m paying you to run my IT. I want you to tell me what I need and how much it’s gonna cost.”

I think the combination, a various of those risks and challenges makes it difficult for many MSPs to leverage the cloud fully for providing IT services to their end customers who are the small and mid-size organizations. In a market that’s one of the limitations today.

You’ve asked how does Nerdio for Azure help address some of these challenges. By being an MSP ourselves, and having had to evolve our business model to leverage the cloud, we’ve built a lot of technology internally for our own use to be able to be able to become … and overcome some of these.

Vince: Vadim, how does Nerdio for Azure solve for this?

Vadim: The way Nerdio for Azure solves a lot of these challenges … As I mentioned, we were an MSP to begin with, so we ran into a lot of these challenges when we had to evolve our business, and we’ve created this technology product initially for our internal consumption and internal use, but ultimately made it available to other MSPs out there, and NFA does. It not only provides the technology that addresses these challenges that I’ll describe in just a minute, but also a lot of the best practice know-how that we as an MSP have developed over the course of our years of being in this business, and we provide that to other MSPs who similarly want to have that shift in their business model.

The way the product … the technology solves the problem is first and foremost, we help our MSP partners use the product to price and package a public cloud or Azure-based IT system in a predictable, per-user-per-month type of a pricing model, which overcomes a lot of that price risk associated with leveraging the cloud for their customers.

What we also do is we help provision the system completely automatically, so you can go in and you can spin up a new customer account with just a couple of clicks, and within two hours have an entire IT system available and ready to go without involvement of any engineer. If you contrast that to doing that manually that’s maybe two to three weeks of full-time engineering or expanding up an IT environment in the cloud end-to-end.

We also then offer a single pane of glass management portal that lets our partners manage their customers’ entire IT environment all in one place. They can manage everything from users, to desktops, to servers, and networking, and backup, and [inaudible 00:09:07], really all in one place, and making it very easy, and seamless, and all integrated together.

Finally, to overcome the perceived cost associated with running an IT environment in the cloud, that seems to be more expensive to a lot of people, we’ve created a tremendous amount of optimization technologies that responds dynamically to the user demand on the IT system, and resizes it based on expected user demand to make sure that it’s efficiently sized, and is not costing the service provider more than it should, or more than their customer is really consuming. Really, the optimization is what makes it more affordable.

Vince: You’re reducing the complexity, you’re reducing the risk, and you’re taking out or reducing the cost that most organizations are scared about or don’t know about, with regards to the cloud migration that we’re all seeing or talking about right now.

Vadim: That’s exactly right. We’re trying and we’re doing that in a very streamlined, and simple, and kind of a … We have this three-click management philosophy in our product that everything is really nice, and simple, and clean to eliminate a lot of the complexity that you mentioned.

Vince: One of the other topics I hear quite a bit about these days in all of my interviews is around the skills gap. It’s a topic that leaders from Microsoft are talking about, partners are talking about, right? Organizations struggle finding, hiring, retaining the talent necessary during this age of transformation. In this environment how does your solution help solve for that?

Vadim: That’s definitely something we’re seeing quite a bit in the market. I mean, there’s very low unemployment overall, but specifically in technology, and specifically for MSPs and service providers finding and retaining top talent. Especially, talent that is familiar with Azure and those types of cloud technologies, and in that level it’s difficult to find and retain them. Even if they do have those people, they’re generally the busiest ones in the organization.

What our product with NFA allows our MSP partners to do is leverage their lower-skilled, maybe tier one/tier two resources to do the types of things that would normally be left to their top-end engineers. They can go in and do pretty much everything needed from provisioning a new account, to onboarding and migrating an existing customer, or customer into Azure. Then managing that customer without really ever needing to get a top Azure engineer involved, unless there is some really complex and a non-standard requirement.

By leveraging Nerdio for Azure, a typical MSP can reduce the skillset required to provide an Azure-based IT services to their customers from needing a high-end engineer to using lower-end resources.

Vince: If I’m a Microsoft partner, particularly an MSP, why should I care, or why should I want to partner with Nerdio?

Vadim: If you’re a Microsoft partner and you’re looking to build or grow your IT services practice, leveraging the Microsoft cloud, that would be obviously Azure and Office 365, what Nerdio allows you to do is eliminate a lot of those friction points, and a lot of those blockers in both selling the Azure-based solution, by allowing you to price it in a more consistent and simple way, and also eliminate a lot of the complexity and risk implementing and managing those environments.

Once those environments are in Azure, there’s additional benefits that MSPs realize by using the product. They obviously can expand their contribution margin from, let’s say an end-user customer who may be buying only Office 365 from them and servicing only Office 365, to now providing an entire suite of IT services. Everything from, including Office 365, but maybe potential virtual desktops, a line of business servers, or backup in [inaudible 00:13:15] security, and all of the technologies we spoke about earlier that go into IT as a service deployment.

Being able to provide it all under one roof, from one provider, using the trusted Microsoft cloud to an end customer results in higher prices, as far as per-user larger share of the wallet, but also higher margins. Typically, partners see margins anywhere between 40 and 60% with a typical customer of theirs.

It also helps on the operation side, because we now have a lower cost of service delivery, because we have so much automation built into Nerdio for Azure, that many things that take typically a lot of time for an MSP to do on behalf of their customer, like adding new employees, or onboarding employees, or provisioning new servers and applications, things that take a long time and are fairly error-prone, can now be done completely automatically by tier one and two to help desk engineers, that eliminates all these mistakes and saves a lot of time.

Then, from the customers’ standpoint it really helps MSPs with driving customer success, because they have this sticky relationship with their customer, because they’re providing an entire IT system to them, as opposed to point solutions from different vendors. Then, the end customers have a better user experience just from the fact that they’re in the cloud, they have everything available to them, no matter what device they’re on, they don’t have to worry about managing physical hardware and having [inaudible 00:14:48] that comes up every few years doing a refresh.

There’s really a customer success story that MSPs are able to realize by using a product like Nerdio for Azure to build their IT services practice in the Microsoft cloud.

Vince: Sounds like a great opportunity for MSPs, and we’re gonna talk about how to find you after, a little bit later in this podcast. I’m curious, why did you choose Azure as your platform of choice for your solution?

Vadim: We’ve been in the Microsoft ecosystem for many years, from the time we started as an MSP, and most of our customers have always been very Microsoft-centric, Microsoft Exchange and SQL server, and RDS, those were some of the core technologies that we were using.

Our DMA has always been, as a Microsoft partner, and then when we created the product and we were talking to other service providers, it really seemed like Azure was really the natural fit of where they wanted their customers’ data to live. Most of them already have adopted Office 365, and Dynamics, and other SaaS solutions from Microsoft, and Azure just seemed like the natural next step for putting all the remainder of the workloads, the line of business servers, and applications and desktops into the Microsoft cloud.

It just seems to fit very well, knowing the ecosystem, and having worked with Microsoft for many years, we were very comfortable that really was the right choice for us to build our product for.

Vince: I think I’ve heard the numbers, 120 million Office 365 users, that’s just startling to me that it’s that large at this point, the ecosystem.

Vadim: It is quite amazing, the rate of adoption, and we’ve seen it firsthand, we’ve been in the exchange space for a long time. We’ve hosted exchange ourselves, and then, as Office 365 came on the scene, the rate of adoption has been really phenomenal.

Vince: I’m gonna shift gears for a moment here. You might know I’m fascinated by the career journey, and, in particular, those who left their native land to come to the United States and to fulfill their dreams. I thought you could share with our listeners a little bit about your personal and professional journey, and how you got to this spot in your life and your career.

Vadim: Sure. I’d be happy to do that. I am originally from Ukraine, from Kiev, to be specific. I grew up there. I spent a couple of years early on in Israel, and I think it was high school when I came to the U.S. I came to Chicago when I was in high school. Fortunately or unfortunately I did not speak any English at that time whatsoever.

Vince: Wow.

Vadim: I think that was one of the things that caused me to really be driven and focused on my studies, and really try to work hard and achieve something. I’ve obviously had a few challenges in getting ramped up to my peers in ninth grade being in high school, but thankfully it worked out. I went on to get a degree in computer engineering from Northwestern here in Chicago-

Vince: Great school.

Vadim: Later … Yeah, I had a great experience there, certainly learned a lot about technology and engineering space. Then, later on I also went to Northwestern, to Kellogg to get my MBA, because I’ve always known that this is the kind of stuff that I wanted to be doing. I really always had lots of innovative ideas about technology, and computers, and business, and I wanted to kind of put it all together and put it to use.

It’s actually coincidental that I started my part-time business degree right the same time I launched a company back in 2005, which gave me a nice playground to apply a lot of the principles that I learned in [inaudible 00:18:29], in my own company that was sort of forming and being launched right at the same time-

Vince: You were your own case study.

Vadim: I was, I certainly was.

Vince: Then you’ve been in business since 2005, is that what I heard you say?

Vadim: I have. This company, Nerdio, has been in business since 2005. My professional background has been in IT. I’ve had a little IT consulting company while in high school, actually. I was going out to people’s houses and fixing computers and networking their … putting their home networks together.

I’ve been in the IT space for a long time. Then in 2005 is when I decided to go out on my own and really launch something innovative, and cloud-based, again, without cloud being the model that was known back then yet. That’s really my background, I have been in technology IT support for many years prior to that.

Vince: Very cool. We’re gonna both be at Microsoft Inspire in a not too short period of time here, and I know that you also are gonna be exhibiting at Inspire this year. Could you tell our listeners if they want to connect or meet-up with you at Inspire, how would they do so?

Vadim: Definitely. I’m very much looking forward to Inspire next week. We’re gonna have a booth. We’re going to be at booth number 528, that’s 5-2-8. We’ll have a number of people on-site there who are gonna be ready to do demos of the product, talk about use cases, and just meet as many partners as we can, so we’re looking forward to meeting lots of partners at Inspire next week. We can also be found at getnerdio.com on the web, yep, so that’s how you can get in touch with us.

]]>https://ultimateguidetopartnering.com/2018/07/12/60-spotlighting-an-innovative-solution-to-cloud-risk-complexity-and-cost/feed/0For this episode of the podcast leading up to Microsoft Inspire, I spotlight a Microsoft partner introducing and showcasing their new innovative solution at the event. - My guest for this episode of the podcast is Vadim Vladimirskiy.For this episode of the podcast leading up to Microsoft Inspire, I spotlight a Microsoft partner introducing and showcasing their new innovative solution at the event.<br />
<br />
My guest for this episode of the podcast is Vadim Vladimirskiy. Vadim is the CEO and Founder of Nerdio. a Microsoft partner with a long tradition in delivering value-added managed services that have developed an innovative platform that reduces the risk, complexity, and cost for service providers delivering cloud services.<br />
<br />
In this episode, Vadim and I discuss his experiences and insights as a managed service provider, the best practices his organization brings to this new innovative product offering, why other Microsoft partners should work with Nerdio and where partners can meet he and the team at Microsoft Inspire, July 15th to the 19th in Las Vegas Nevada.<br />
<br />
And if you are coming to Inspire, please join me in the Commons Theater on Wednesday, July 18th at 2:30 for a special session where I’ll share “What they don’t teach working with Microsoft”.<br />
<br />
You can listen to the podcast or view the transcript here or on iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, Google Play, Player FM, other Android podcast players.<br />
<br />
As with each of my interview and articles, I appreciate your feedback. You can reach out to me on Linked In, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram or on email at vincem@cloudwavepartners.com. You can also review this podcast by going to iTunes and searching “Ultimate Guide to Partnering” and clicking on the album art and hitting the rating link. This helps others find the podcast.<br />
<br />
TRANSCRIPT OF THE INTERVIEW<br />
<br />
Vince: Vadim, welcome to the podcast.<br />
<br />
Vadim: Thanks. It's great to be here.<br />
<br />
Vince: I'm excited to have you as a guest on Ultimate Guide to Partnering. You and I have gotten to know each other pretty well over the last several months working on your Go-to-Market plan with Microsoft. I'm glad you could join today to discuss your company, its value proposition, and your personal and professional journey. So, welcome.<br />
<br />
Vadim: Thanks so much. I'm really glad to be here, and thanks for having me on.<br />
<br />
Vince: Can you begin by telling our listeners a little bit about Nerdio, and how you got started.<br />
<br />
Vadim: Absolutely. We started Nerdio back in 2005. Initially, we were an online backup company in the market that was pretty new back in those days and then quickly evolved into a managed services provider, an MSP, that was offering a very unique hosted IT type of a service.<br />
<br />
We were using cloud-type IT before cloud was The Cloud, so initially, we were offering services around RDS and remote desktop services, and terminal services, and then eventually transitioned to more of a VDI-type of technology, and have created a business that has hundreds of companies all around the world using our services.<br />
<br />
Vince: For our listeners who don't know, how do you define MSP or managed service provider?<br />
<br />
Vadim: I guess the easiest way to think about it is an IT services company that takes care of either some or all of the IT needs of a particular organization. These IT needs typically include things like: monitoring of the IT system, fixing any problems as they arise, providing tech support to users, help desk, and providing consulting services, and things like that. Usually these services are provided as a month subscription by the MSP or the managed services provider.<br />
<br />
Vince: I've heard you talk about IT as a service. For our listeners, what is IT as a service? Can you explain that to us?<br />
<br />
Vadim: Sure, sure. The easiest way in my mind to think about IT as a services is as a superset of other as a servi...Vince Menzione - Technology Industry Sales and Partner Executiveclean22:25
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#59 – Capitalize on the Digital Transformation Opportunityhttps://ultimateguidetopartnering.com/2018/07/11/59-capitalize-on-the-digital-transformation-opportunity-with-melissa-mulholland-help-them-grow-and-see-that-transformation-come-to-life/
https://ultimateguidetopartnering.com/2018/07/11/59-capitalize-on-the-digital-transformation-opportunity-with-melissa-mulholland-help-them-grow-and-see-that-transformation-come-to-life/#respondWed, 11 Jul 2018 16:06:47 +0000https://ultimateguidetopartnering.com/?p=1528 For this special series of the podcast, leading up to Microsoft Inspire, I interview leaders from Microsoft’s One Commercial Partner team to discuss the work that their teams are doing in this age of rapid digital transformation. My guest for this episode of the podcast is Melissa Mulholland – Melissa is the worldwide lead … Continue reading "#59 – Capitalize on the Digital Transformation Opportunity"

For this special series of the podcast, leading up to Microsoft Inspire, I interview leaders from Microsoft’s One Commercial Partner team to discuss the work that their teams are doing in this age of rapid digital transformation.

My guest for this episode of the podcast is Melissa Mulholland – Melissa is the worldwide lead driving strategy and business development for how businesses can be profitable in the Cloud. Specifically, Melissa is focused on enabling partners and customers to accelerate their business transformation in the Cloud delivering increased profitability, efficiency, and scale across Microsoft’s Cloud services.

In this episode Melissa and I discuss her work consulting with Microsoft Patners to transform their businesses – the amazing body of work she and the team have produced to help partner capitilze on the digital transformation opportunity – her career journey – and what’s in store for partners at Microsoft Inspire, July 15 to the 19th in Las Vegas, NV.

If you are coming to Inspire, please join me in the Commons Theater on Wednesday, July 18th at 2:30 for a special session where I’ll share “What they don’t teach working with Microsoft”.

Melissa M: Thank you so you much, Vince. It’s a pleasure to be here today. I love getting the opportunity to connect with people like yourselves, and the partner community.

Vince: Well, thank you for taking the time from your compressed schedule to talk to our listeners about the amazing work you and the team have been doing to enable and empower our partners, and all the great sessions in store for partners next week at Microsoft Inspire. And, I know just how busy this week must be for you. So, again, thank you so much.

Melissa M: Of course. The pleasure’s all mine. When it comes down to it, it’s being able to connect with the partner community that inspires me. It gives me all the great insight around the work that I do at Microsoft, because it’s thanks to partners that really drive our revenue across our ecosytem.

Vince: So, for our listeners who don’t know, can you explain your role and mission in the Worldwide One Commercial Partner Organization at Microsoft?

Melissa M: Thanks for that. Yes. So, I’ve been at Microsoft ten, across a variety of different roles. But, I would say that the role I’m currently in right now, is by far, the one I’m having the most fun in, in my ten years at Microsoft.

So, in the one commercial partner organization, I help partners by consulting them and helping them drive their business transformation, with the ultimate objectivity of course, of being profitable. And, I do that by, going and listening, and learning from successful companies that have built specialization and focus areas in helping drive customer problems. And so, it’s been a really interesting journey over the past year, that I’ve been in this space, because it’s fostered all this great content that we are able to share out with the broader ecosystem. So, many are maybe familiar with Partner Practice Development Play books that we have in market, as well as profitability studies we do. All of that is curated from the work that I do with Partners.

Vince: Yeah. And so, I’m fascinated by the work that you do. I know we’ve spoken before about it. And so, you’re clearly not someone who just sits at a desk, right? And you’ve been working partners that transform their business, in fact getting in, peeling back with those partners, getting to know their business, consulting with them on best practices, and the like. And so, I’d like for you to share with our listeners, a little bit about the work that you’ve been doing, specifically with those partners on results and outcomes.

Melissa M: Yeah. That’s a great one. So, I have this unique opportunity, where, I’m not specific with a partner category, which frees me to be able to work with large and small companies around the world, with different, can I say focus areas. And so, I have the opportunity to go in and actually work with the business leaders, typically CEOs, and their leadership team, to really understand how they’ve been successful. But then, more importantly, where do they want to see their business go in the next three to five years? And then, go in and help consultant determine, you know, where the opportunities that we can to even tighter partnership with Microsoft.

But, sometimes it even spans beyond just Microsoft, so going in and understanding, you know, what are their strengths today in the market, mapping out where their strategy is in the next three, like I said, three to five years. But then, determining, what are those gaps that are preventing them from seizing that opportunity. And so, oftentimes, that comes down to determining, do they need to invest in a new set of resources, or do they need to approach their go to market differently? And, by doing that, it infosters all of the learnings that I gain, that I can then take all of that, and transpire it into content that we can share with our global partner community, through the work that we do today.

It’s really interesting. I always have a saying, “We need to really take off the labels that we put on ourselves, because we create these own biases.” It’s human nature. And, we at Microsoft have done this historically ourselves. And so, what we need to really start to do is, really if you want to, “If you want to catch a fish, you need to learn how to think like a fish.” And, that’s from a mentor of mine, Mark Stuart, who leads a consulting company called, Neuro Impact, and I have been learning so much from his philosophy around that.

Because, the truth is, is that every business is different, and we really need to be humble and respect the fact that companies have been successful for some shape or reason. And, why is that? What’s really driven their success? But then, more importantly, where do they want to take their business in the future? And then, how do we help, from a Microsoft standpoint, help them grow and see that future come to life?

Vince: Mm. You’ve said something really important here about the fact that we have categorized partners, we put them into buckets. IS fees, SIs, transactional partners, traditionally over the years. And, during this transformation so much is being disrupted, including the partner business models, is what I’m hearing you saying here. I want you to peel back a little bit more on that, and what you’ve been experiencing in your conversations with these partners through the transformation.

Melissa M: Yeah. That’s a really great point. Thanks for bringing that up. Because, it’s true we all put labels on things, and sometimes it’s an easier approach, because there’s some like similarities between what we call a classifying ISV, or an LSP model, or traditional distributor. But, the truth is, is that it is really being destructed. Partners are evolving their business models when they look at their revenue streams, and no longer would I say, a traditional LSP partner is just bucketized into doing reselling. At Inspire, in one of my sessions, I’ll be showcasing a company that inspires me, because the leader and the CEO founder of the company, has really decided to say, “What’s the company we want to be? Who is that?”

And yes, there’s this whole aspect of, recurring revenue, and revenue that they need to keep their baseline in order to make that transformation, but they’re really transforming, taking off our preconceived notions of what, for example, a traditional LSP would be. And so, what I’m seeing across the ecosystem is, that their, the models are really molding together. We’re seeing some of our largest global partners have, what I would say, is some ISV like solutions in their marketplace.

And so, it’s really not on us to really come in and say that, “You are segmented into the specific category.” And, I think that’s through the innovation that we’re seeing partners strive, from doing managed services, to building out their own IP, and then adding more value on top of it, so that they can, at the end of the day, help their customers. And that, for me, is what transformations are all about.

Vince: So, you’ve been pretty busy. You and the team are publishing a new series of e-books, five books from what I understand. Digital transformation series. That are to help partners on their path transformation and building successful practices. What are some of the key findings from this work you can share with us?

Melissa M: Yeah. It’s a great one. Thanks for bringing that up. It’s been a really exciting effort. Probably some of the most rewarding work that I’ve put into these e-books, that will be launching fully at Inspire. You can access two of the books today. But, what these books are … Well, I should step back a little bit. Last year at Inspire, Judson and Satia we’re talking about the importance of digital transformation, and listening to them, quickly realized that we were not necessarily providing that guidance to what a partner transformation journey looks like. We often talk at Microsoft around digital transformation, but it’s really focused on customers. And, what occurred to me is that, it’s equally important for partners to also transform themselves, because at the end of the day, if they’re going to help serve customers better, they really need to be thinking about their business model, and being in the digital age.

So, these five e-books were written in partnership with IDC, and their built upon the successful modern partner series that we launched about two years ago. And across the five books, they focus really on the core aspect of what we see, what’s a transformed, or a successfully transformed partners looking like. But, the truth of all of it is, is transformation is never ending. It’s a continuous journey. I had … The other day I was talking to one successful CEO, and I was fascinated by his continuous push for, “Your self-critical.” Continuously pushing for, what does he want the business to look like, and inspecting it around, is he meeting those objectives? Is he transforming in the right way? And, that’s the type of, I would say, thought leadership that we try to aggregate into these, into these books. So, they’re across the four pillars of what we classify as digital transformation.

So, thinking of ways that you engage your existing customers, but also nurturing and fostering new customers in your ecosystem, to empowering your employees. So, talking about things like the importance of culture, and the talent that you want to foster in your company, to optimizing your operations. So, how do you drive efficiencies for both your internal operations, but then also drive insights that will enable you to drive more solution selling and, or products that will help serve your customers better? And then, the last one is around transforming products. Which has, I would say, very much IP lens focused to it, but, the key here is, is how are you continuously innovating to drive solutions that your customers want and need? And so, these five books, and of course, the first one’s around the whole opportunity that we see in the market, which equates to 20 trillion dollars.

Vince: Wow.

Melissa M: It’s staggering. Some people sit back and go, “Wow. That doesn’t seem accurate. It’s too big. It’s too inflated.” But, what, if you think about that, that’s not cloud transformation, that’s across hardware, software, services, so, it’s really encompassing of the whole market opportunity. And, if the partners aren’t thinking about how they’re going to capture that, and, they’re going to be left behind to be honest with you, because, we as customers are always evolving. And, everything we do now seems to be almost in the digital age, from ordering a car, via lifter Uber, to being able to do two day shipping on Amazon through your phone in a one click button. That’s all activated through digital transformation.

Vince: So, what are the characteristics of a transform partner?

Melissa M: Yeah. Great one. So, I would say, there’s … People ask me all the time, what does … Name a transform partner today. And it’s a really hard one to pin down, because, across those four facets I talked about, from how they engage customers, to how they empower their employees, optimizing operations and transforming products. I would say, a lot of partners are are doing well, in maybe in one or two of those aspects. Because transformation, is a costly endeavor. It’s, we cannot underestimate the work that a company needs to do to transform.

So, a couple of different things that I see. One is, they actively use digital marketing as a key way to engage customers. We see typically about 80% of consumers or customers coming to a website, are typically net new to that organization. and so, it’s really important to think about your business growth around capturing who those net new customers are, and, having a digital presence, is really critical to that. And, I would say it’s not just a website that you put up there, it’s around how you engage with your customer on that website, offering solutions and services. Because, consumers buying behavior has really changed. It’s really destructive. We no longer pick up a phone book, and flip through, and decide, who are we going to call. Help us. It’s all done typically, and online, or social aspects.

Vince: Yep.

Melissa M: Another aspect is, creating customer value. This is so … I cannot emphasize this enough. So many companies today that I … Tend to be very generic, and offering solutions like Office 365, where you even, as your backup storage, et cetera. But, they don’t really get into, “How am I going to solve what you’re looking for?” So, having some industry specialization, or even horizontal specialization, such as HR business processes, more financial services from an industry perspective. But, really getting anchored into a specialization, because, typically customers have an orientation, and they are looking for somebody with specialization to help solve their needs. Easy to do business with. I mean, that sounds like such a basic one.

Vince: So, how do you define that one?

Melissa M: Good one. It’s a big open ended one, but I will say that, it is easy to do business with, meaning offers customer support, is very responsive, helps customer’s needs. The other day, I was on the phone with the company trying to return some furniture, and I had to be on hold for three hours. That’s not easy to do business.

Vince: That’s crazy.

Melissa M: If you think it … Yeah. It is crazy. ‘Cause then, on the other hand, I worked with another company, and this is just me as a consumer, but, I was able to cancel my order in a one click button. And I got a notification about a minute later, the money was refunded back to my credit card. That’s digital transformation. And, how that term sometimes seems so overly used, I don’t really know of a better word. Because, it’s done digital, and it’s transformed.

Whereas, this other company, who’s a global company out there today, that we probably all purchased from, you have to do it all through the phone, and I have to wait speak to a customer service rep. And, for a moment I thought, “Is this intentionally their strategy? To make me really mad on the phone?” But, the truth is, is that, I don’t think it probably is, ’cause it probably deters people from wanting to go and purchase from there.

So, ease of doing business is, from all aspects, from how you engage with your customers, to things of response time to the solutions that you provide. At the end of the day, they to need to add value. Because, people can choose to go to your competitor at the end of the day, and you want to make sure that you continuously nurture that relationship.

Vince: Yeah. So true. So, what guidance would you give to partners to get started?

Melissa M: I would say first, really be thoughtful about your strategy of, “Where do you want to take your business?” Sometimes it’s easier to start with your existing customers, and understanding, who’s the customer that you want to acquire in the future? And then, back ending into that. But, you really need to be deliberate about what your strategy is, and what your priorities are going to be. Because, there’s an investment cost associated to any type of transformation that you’re going to do. Hiring new people, can be costly. If, for example, you want to develop an artificial intelligence practice, you may have to hire net new developers, and or data scientist, which are premium costs in the market today. And are actually, at times can be hard to find.

So, you need to be really deliberate about where you want to take your business. And, I’d also say don’t try to do all of these things at once, ’cause you need to also be profitable. And so, you know really understanding. Do you have access to capital? Do you have investors that can fund what your strategy is? And then, determining over the course of what is, six months, a year, whatever your time duration is, depending on where you’re at in the journey. How are you going to go solve that and make these transformational changes?

In the e-book series, you’ll see a number of partners that we interviewed, who have done various aspects of the transformation journey. Would I say all of them are fully transformed? No. Because, as I mentioned earlier, the transformation journeys continuous. But, they certainly made it a priority. And, I would say that, what we’re seeing even just from the research that we did with IDC, that, for example, those that have really focus on their operations and really driving automation, are seeing a 10% increase in their returns. And, conjunctively, those that have really focused on engaging customers through digital marketing, are also seeing higher profits. So, there’s a number of different aspects to it, but be really thoughtful about what types of solutions you want to provide your customers. Understanding where you are at today, and then mapping accordingly what the gaps you have are, and what are you going to do to solve that internally, so that you can continuously grow as a business.

Vince: So, across all the companies, you’ve had the enviable task of working with some of the best partners in the Microsoft ecosystem. Of the companies that you work with, what are the most successful companies doing? Where they investing in the transformational journey?

Melissa M: I would say that, most of the companies I see, are really investing talent, their employees. From, making sure that they foster a culture that it’s a place you want to work at. And that sounds so basic, but, even if I step back, and look at what we’re doing at Microsoft, that’s exactly what Satia has prioritized. Is transforming the culture of how we think, and how we go to, how we work come to work each day. And, I would say that now more than ever, I really want to think outside of the box, to help drive solutions for my partners, who are my customers, at the end of the day.

And, that’s all driven by culture. So, I would say, really focusing on the existing talent they have, but also understanding what talent they need to have in order to build for, example, IP, or be able to drive technical solutions that they want to have in market.

I would say from more of a solutions standpoint, we’re seeing a lot of companies really go deep into, I would say, more emerging solutions such as artificial intelligence. Because, when we talk about transformation, it really breaks down the mold, it’s not a one product type of offering. It’s really truly called, The Art of a Possible, because you can create endless solutions based off of it. So, we’re seeing a lot of companies invest in there, and of course, like I mentioned, how they engage your customers? How they drive automation? How they think about IP?

IP is a really big one. When talk about profitability, companies that invest in their own IP, they see 70 plus percent of margin on their offerings, because it makes them unique. It’s no longer generic, you know, I’m a cloud partner, and I can do everything for you. It’s a one size fits all offering. It’s really specialized, and it makes them unique compared to their competitors. So, IP, and I would say, talent, are the, from the top two areas that I see companies that are successful investing in today.

Vince: And you’re going to be speaking about some of these topics at Inspire, right? So, I was going through a list, and I think there was … I counted at least nine, maybe twelve different sessions that you’re part of that the Microsoft inspire conference this year, is that right?

Melissa M: That’s right. I’m going to be very busy, but, I get so much energy from meeting with partners, because it’s so great to see companies do what they do to be successful. It inspires me every day. Not to use that word intentionally, but yes, I have a general session that I’m really excited about because, I think I’ve talked to you about this before Vince, but my son is a product of technology. And so, I’m going to talk a little bit about that, and showcasing how digital transformation affects all of our lives. And, the interesting thing about my son is that, just recently, there was a French partner that came up with a solution that inspired me. And, it inspired me to say, “Could this work with helping my son be able to speak?” And, I don’t want to give too much away, but that is a story I’ll be telling at Inspire.

Because, technology has really shaped his life, and he’s not even four years old yet. But, I think I shared with you before, but his life was saved because we were able to detect an early issue while I was pregnant, and then we were able to intervene. And, this wouldn’t have been possible hundred years ago.

Vince: Yeah.

Melissa M: So-

Vince: Not even 20 years ago. No.

Melissa M: No. Yeah. And it’s what excites me about partners, is they’ve got the opportunity to create these types of solutions and really help transform our lives, whether it’s in the health care field, and or at any … I can come up with countless examples. But that’s what I’m excited about Inspire for, is a number of great sessions. You’re going to see a lot of things around artificial intelligence, and, a lot of new things that we’ve got coming out, but excited to see the partner community there.

Vince: And that general session you were just talking about, that’s called, ‘Capitalize on the Digital Transformation Opportunity’. Correct?

Melissa M: That’s right.

Vince: And that is being held … What time is that? That is a general session, on Monday, the 15th.

Melissa M: Monday.

Vince: At 4:15.

Melissa M: At 4:15.

Vince: Yep. So, we’re gonna make sure we have a link to that in our show notes for people who haven’t registered yet. I think you were telling me a little bit earlier, that’s already over oversubscribed. But hopefully, they’ll be standing room, or you’ll move to another location so that everyone can attend that.

Melissa M: Yes. PLease come. It will be great to see many of you there. It’s a general session that is … I’m a featured speaker on the Inspire portal, so you’ll see it there as well. But, I would encourage you to come as well as, try to take place in some of the great sessions that we have. But, this one is particularly interesting because, I really want to put it in the lens of, what’s valuable to a partner? Strip away all the conversation surrounding the products, and why Microsoft can really focus on some of the key learnings that we’ve gained from this e-book series, and interviewing successful partners. I’m really excited because I have this CEO of Fit Titan, G-Man. Yep. Who believe it or not, it’s global company that many of you may know, these help sponsor Inspire. But, they actually started as you know, from his house. He started this company probably, I think, about ten years ago, out of nothing, and now they’re quite successful. But he’s a great example of a leader who’s continuously thinking about, what’s next, and how he needs to evolve his company in order to really seize that opportunity.

Vince: That’s terrific. So, Melissa, you’re both a millennial, and a woman in technology, and if you’ve been following my podcast, you know that I’m fascinated by the journey, and how people got to a particular spot in their career and their life. And, I was hoping you could take our listeners on the journey. 10 years at Microsoft, tell us what it’s been like.

Melissa M: Thanks Vince. It’s been quite a ride. I can’t believe it’s been 10 years. And in technology, I’ve been in the field for the past 12 years, including my time at Intel. And, it’s been an incredible journey. I would say, there’s a couple different key milestones that really shaped my career, and if I step back and think about it, it’s one of the key, I would say, foundational aspects I had, was when I worked at Intel. And, the company at the time, was going through a massive transformation, and I was in finance, and they said, “Can you look at some of this cost reduction for direction efforts? We’re going to have to layoff 16 thousand people.” At that time. And, it got me thinking, I’m like, “There’s kind of be other ways to reduce costs.”

And so, I looked at the time, I was studying environmental economics, and they came up with this idea of taking recycled chips and turn those into solar panels. And, they said, “Why not? Dig into it. Let’s see what you find out.” And, now they’re one of the most greenest companies in the world, because they did end up implementing this project across their facilities. While it’s a remarkable story, the thing that really touches me, is that they did not limit me by age, or gender, or anything, they let me come up with a great idea. And, I’d say, that was a hallmark for me around, anything is possible if you really dig in, and you really learn something, and you’ve got great coaching and mentorship to guide you, you’ll see success.

And so, that has really just given me the confidence to come in and then, obviously in my time at Microsoft had similar types of aspects along the way. And, being a woman in technology isn’t always easy, especially when I walk into a room, and they think I’m twenty years old, and I’m not. “Does she have any credibility to provide?” But, what I’m finding more and more is that, people’s perspectives are changing, and you overcome that. And if you really have something valuable to provide, people are usually quite open to hearing about it. And so, it’s been an incredible journey being in this field of technology, and having a company that sponsors me to be able to work with global CEO’s of billion dollar industries around the world. It’s an incredible opportunity that I have, and I’m really excited to be able to do this as a career.

Vince: So, you must’ve had some incredible mentors and coaches along the way. What was one of the best pieces of advice that you received?

Melissa M: That’s a great question. I have to think about that one. I would say two things with quality and integrity. I’m a big believer in, don’t do something if you don’t really believe in what you’re doing, and do it with the utmost quality. I would say my current manager is by far, probably been the best manager I’ve ever had at Microsoft, and he really pushes me to think bigger, bolder, and to continuously do things better and think outside the box. Additionally I would say, always listen and learn, be humble, know that you continuously can always learn more from others, and be open to what’s possible. Because, when you open up your mind to anything that could come your way. the opportunities will come. We often … I really like say this, we often create our own biases, or we limit ourselves, because of, we don’t think we’re good enough, or we don’t think we can do it, or we’re not smart enough. But, if you try to remove those own internal ISC’s, you really will be able to open your mind to something new. And, that’s where creativity comes, and innovation in which you’ll be able to do something that much better.

Vince: I love that. And, you get to work with so many great partners. You get to see the ecosystem from left to right, from the top down. What is one thing that isn’t taught, that you believe is true, successfully partnering with Microsoft?

Melissa M: I would say, relationship building is so important. If you say you’re going to do something, really follow through. and have integrity in what you do and your actions. So oftentimes, we say we’re gonna do something, we don’t follow through, or we burn relationships.You never know when you’re going to cross that bridge again, and you’re going to have to come across that individual. And so, really building out a strong network of people to help guide you, support you, learn from, is so critical. I wouldn’t be able to do any of the work I do, if it wasn’t for the incredible partnership I get from Partners, because all of it, to be honest with you, is built by Partners. The playbooks that I do, are written by Partners in the course, I co-write them. We go in and we interview successful companies that have built a practice area in that solution. We do that with Partners.

So, the key to me that I have always learned is, relationship building and having trust, is so important, and that’s not something that you can just be taught through a course. Something you really have to continuously put effort too.

Vince: And, you’ve been heads down, really busy right now, planning for Inspire, putting out the series of e-books. But, is there a book that you’ve read, either recently or in the past, that has inspired you, and especially inspires you now during this time of transformation?

Melissa M: So, I don’t think I have a specific book in mind, probably because, I have been doing so much writing. We have, in addition to the e-books, we’re also launching a cloud migration a modernization playbook at Inspire. An, ISV playbook at Inspire. I’m doing so much writing. We’re refreshing the AI, so you’ll be able to get printed copies. Actually, at Inspire, we are going to have a few printed copies, so please, make sure to pick those up. Quite a big hit for Partners, and we continuously to provide that.

But, I would say, what I have … The most recent thing that’s really inspired me, and I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s a book, but I’ve been following him through blogs, is a psychologist named Michael Gervais, who has taught this incredible course at Microsoft, and works with companies around the world and leaders, to really think about harnessing their own capabilities, and activating their high performance mindset.

And, that is something that I have continuously practiced each and every day. Satia has been doing it as well. And, you’ll see articles published about it. But, it’s really taking the time to think about, intentionally mindfulness training, I guess you would say it. So, that’s something that I’ve been following up on recently, just because I think, there’s so much to really putting 100% yourself into a specific project, or key thing.

Vince: Yeah. I love Dr Michael Gervais. He’s amazing. I think, we’ve spoken earlier, I’ve gotten the opportunity to work with him, and he has a podcast as well, so we’ll probably, point our listeners in that direction. But I wanted to peel back a little bit on the e-books, ’cause you’d mentioned them. I wanna make sure that we reference them one more time, and we’re going to put links in the show notes that people can find them. Can you go through that list of the e-books that you’re releasing?

Melissa M: Yes. So, as I mentioned, I’ve been a busy writer. So, we have a five e-book series called, The Digital Transformation Opportunity series. So, that’s five e-books, so there’s a Digital Transformation Opportunity. And, these are co-written with IDC. There’s four more, so, Engaging Customers, Empowering Employees, Optimize Operations, Transform Product, and, if you’ll be at Inspire, you’ll get a … Hopefully. if all goes well, I’m finishing Transfer Products, today. You’ll get a printed copy of the books all in one. And then, additionally, we have the Cloud Migration of Modernization playbook, which I’m really proud of. It’s been almost a year’s worth of work to aggregate the best practices of actually how do you do this. It’s quite a complex process and being able to pull that together in a guide, really excited about.

And then, additionally, we have the AI playbook, which has been very, very popular, we launched it back in January. And, refreshing that, because we made a lot of updates at Build, our developer conference, that have been released, we want to make sure we have the latest and greatest for Partners. And, we have a new IC playbook coming out as well. So, lots of great content. It’s all available on our NPM portal. But, for the digital transformation e-book series, we’re actually launching a new page on NPN that will house all of the links, and of course, we’ll make sure to get this out the audience today.

Vince: Great. There’s just so much great information, our listeners need to find that. There’s just some great nuggets there for all of us who are transforming or building businesses. And, for listeners who want to learn more about engaging with you in the team Melissa, what’s the best way for them to do so?

Melissa M: You can always find me on Twitter, LinkedIn, but, you can also reach out to me too. I’m, like I said, relationships are so critical to my learning and development, and also you know how I can help support you, so, you can always reach out to me in e-mail as well, so we can provide that to you following the call. But please, by any stretch, you can always reach out to me through social media.

Vince: And what are your social media handles?

Melissa M: It is, my Twitter handle is @melimulho, it’s a tongue twister and then, you can find me Melissa Mulholland on LinkedIn.

Vince: OK will provide that, those links in the show notes as well. Melissa, I want to thank you. I know just how busy, in fact, if you were listening on this podcast, you could realize how busy. You’re still writing as we’re getting ready for Inspire. So, I want to thank you for taking time for our listeners, to spend time here on the podcast, to join the Ultimate Guide to Partnering and for allowing us, and taking us through this amazing transformation and journey.

Melissa M: Thank you so much for the opportunity. It’s always a pleasure to get to connect with you, and the audience, ’cause, it’s the best part of the job that I get to do each and every day. So, thank you.

]]>https://ultimateguidetopartnering.com/2018/07/11/59-capitalize-on-the-digital-transformation-opportunity-with-melissa-mulholland-help-them-grow-and-see-that-transformation-come-to-life/feed/0 - For this special series of the podcast, leading up to Microsoft Inspire, I interview leaders from Microsoft's One Commercial Partner team to discuss the work that their teams are doing in this age of rapid digital transformation. - <br />
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<br />
For this special series of the podcast, leading up to Microsoft Inspire, I interview leaders from Microsoft's One Commercial Partner team to discuss the work that their teams are doing in this age of rapid digital transformation.<br />
<br />
My guest for this episode of the podcast is Melissa Mulholland - Melissa is the worldwide lead driving strategy and business development for how businesses can be profitable in the Cloud. Specifically, Melissa is focused on enabling partners and customers to accelerate their business transformation in the Cloud delivering increased profitability, efficiency, and scale across Microsoft's Cloud services.<br />
<br />
In this episode Melissa and I discuss her work consulting with Microsoft Patners to transform their businesses – the amazing body of work she and the team have produced to help partner capitilze on the digital transformation opportunity - her career journey - and what’s in store for partners at Microsoft Inspire, July 15 to the 19th in Las Vegas, NV.<br />
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If you are coming to Inspire, please join me in the Commons Theater on Wednesday, July 18th at 2:30 for a special session where I’ll share “What they don’t teach working with Microsoft”.<br />
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You can listen to the podcast or view the transcript here or on iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, Google Play, Player FM, other Android podcast players.<br />
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As with each of my interview and articles, I appreciate your feedback. You can reach out to me on Linked In, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram or on email at vincem@cloudwavepartners.com. You can also review this podcast by going to iTunes and searching “Ultimate Guide to Partnering” and clicking on the album art and hitting the rating link. This helps others find the podcast.<br />
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Links to the content we discussed:<br />
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The Digital Transformation Opportunity eBook Series https://aka.ms/dtopportunity<br />
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Inspire Session: https://myinspire.microsoft.com/sessions/94a2be88-99be-4307-8a62-3347da7ef013?source=sessions<br />
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How to reach Melissa : https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissa-mulholland/<br />
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Transcript of the Interview<br />
<br />
Vince: Melissa, welcome to the podcast.<br />
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Melissa M: Thank you so you much, Vince. It's a pleasure to be here today. I love getting the opportunity to connect with people like yourselves, and the partner community.<br />
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Vince: Well, thank you for taking the time from your compressed schedule to talk to our listeners about the amazing work you and the team have been doing to enable and empower our partners, and all the great sessions in store for partners next week at Microsoft Inspire. And, I know just how busy this week must be for you. So, again, thank you so much.<br />
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Melissa M: Of course. The pleasure's all mine. When it comes down to it, it's being able to connect with the partner community that inspires me. It gives me all the great insight around the work that I do at Microsoft, because it's thanks to partners that really drive our revenue across our ecosytem.<br />
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Vince: So, for our listeners who don't know, can you explain your role and mission in the Worldwide One Commercial Partner Organization at Microsoft?<br />
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Melissa M: Thanks for that. Yes. So, I've been at Microsoft ten, across a variety of different roles. But, I would say that the role I'm currently in right now, is by far, the one I'm having the most fun in, in my ten years at Microsoft.<br />
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So, in the one commercial partner organization, I help partners by consulting them and helping them drive their business transformation, with the ultimate objectivity of course, of being profitable. And, I do that by, going and listening, and learning from successful companies that have built specialization and focus areas in helping drive custome...Vince Menzione - Technology Industry Sales and Partner Executiveclean35:02
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#58 – Focus on Launching Successful Partner Business Modelshttps://ultimateguidetopartnering.com/2018/07/10/58-focus-on-launching-successful-partner-business-models/
https://ultimateguidetopartnering.com/2018/07/10/58-focus-on-launching-successful-partner-business-models/#respondTue, 10 Jul 2018 21:31:18 +0000https://ultimateguidetopartnering.com/?p=1522For this special series of the podcast, leading up to Microsoft Inspire, I interview leaders from Microsoft’s One Commercial Partner team to discuss the work that their teams are doing in this age of rapid digital transformation. My guest for this episode is Brent Combest, the general manager of the US One Commercial Partner organization … Continue reading "#58 – Focus on Launching Successful Partner Business Models"

For this special series of the podcast, leading up to Microsoft Inspire, I interview leaders from Microsoft’s One Commercial Partner team to discuss the work that their teams are doing in this age of rapid digital transformation.

My guest for this episode is Brent Combest, the general manager of the US One Commercial Partner organization responsible for Microsoft Value-added Service Partners to build profitable practices with and through Microsoft.

Brent and I discuss the work his team does to help partners transform their businesses and build profitable and sustainable business models, his journey from the channel to Microsoft, and what’s in store for partners July 15 through the 19th in Las Vegas, Nevada. And if you’re coming to Inspire, please join me in the commons theater on Wednesday, July 18th at 2:30 for a special session where I’ll share what they don’t teach working with Microsoft.

Vince: It is great to have you here. Thank you for taking time from your compressed schedule. You are the general manager in the One Commercial Partner team focused on helping value added service providers scale their business with and through Microsoft. I’m excited to hear from you about your organization’s role and focus, how partners can maximize the results of their practice with Microsoft, your view on this amazing transformation, and what’s in store for partners in Microsoft Inspire. So welcome.

Brent: Thank you very much. I’m happy to have this conversation. Some great topics there.

Vince: So first off, can you explain to our listeners, in simple terms, the role of your organization at Microsoft?

Brent: Sure. We reside inside of the One Commercial Partner organization here in the US and my team has 26 partner development managers inside of it and collectively, we look after about 650 partners from around the United States, some of the top partners that are driving our transformational cloud business. And our mission as a team is to help these partners develop modern practices that develop strong, sustainable growth in a very profitable way so that these partners are able to reinvest and create additional growth for the future.

Vince: So why is Microsoft investing in this team and at this time?

Brent: Well for us it all starts with our business model. Microsoft, for as long as I can remember has been a partner obsessed company. To the degree that we invest heavily in understanding our channel, what’s driving success and wanting to share those best practices across the ecosystem. We invest as a company about a million dollars a year, just in research to understand what makes the best partners as great as they are. And then, from that, we take that knowledge and want to help others from across the ecosystem to flourish. And this is really the core of PDM does, a partner development manager does.

They are, in my mind, an adjunct board member or an adjunct executive of a partner’s leadership team. Their role is to come in and to help them paint that long-term vision for where they’re going to go strategically down the road and to help demystify some of the things that are in the market today from an opportunity standpoint, translate how technology solves those challenges, and then coach them down that journey, all the while, bringing in those best practices that we’re gathering and learning through our research and this spans everything from sales and marketing to offering to a go to market strategy. They really, in my mind, are the Sherpa that help the partners to build for the future and then are with them every step of the journey as they go forward.

Vince: So I think I’m hearing practice development here, coming across loud and clear, in terms of this conversation and I’ve seen you speak in great detail to partners on how to maximize their practice with Microsoft and in the cloud, and so I’d love for you to spend some time here sharing some of those great nuggets that you’ve shared with others. I think it would be very compelling for our listeners.

Brent: Sure. Well, this are’s my passion. I’ve spent virtually the entirety of my career working in the channel and with the channel. Before I came to Microsoft, I worked for three different partners and the dynamic side and saw what I like to always call the good, the bad, and the ugly of the channel. You know. I worked for one partner that was right in the middle of the dot com boom, became a victim of it and the story I always tell is I was employee number 73, we went to 103 but I was one of the 15 that turned the lights off.

I worked for one of the biggest dynamics partners so I got to see how a well-oiled machine worked and how they continued to create growth and then I eventually left that one to help some old colleagues to start one of the very first Microsoft CRM partners back in the day. And so I got to feel the challenges and the opportunities of being in that start-up environment and building something from scratch. So collectively we could go out and see if we could create a new market around this new offering that Microsoft was bringing up and I learned so much along that journey, from a profitability standpoint around what the levers are that determine success or failure and I brought that passion with me inside of Microsoft and continued over my 12 and a half year journey to focus on partners and coach them and really understand what makes them tick and where maybe some of the biggest challenges lie and what partners can to do to kind of get around that.

And I’ve loved every minute of that journey. Every role that I’ve had has been centered around partners and to be honest with you as we go forward, I have no interest in any role that doesn’t lead with partners and working with them.

Vince: And so, how did you get to Microsoft? How did you get to this particular spot in your life and career?

Brent: Well, it’s a funny journey, right> I was in that channel for an extended period of time but for the most part, I was raised in Seattle and when Microsoft calls you, it’s kind of like the Yankees calling, you go play for the Yankees, right?

Vince: Yeah.

Brent: So I had a great opportunity come my way to come into Microsoft and at the time, I was going to work on the existing customer marketing team for dynamics, which was the sweet spot for me. I knew the dynamics business really well and I could come in and work with other partners on how to build their strategy around maximizing revenue and potential to their existing customer base.

And so I started there and spent a couple of years in that role. Then I was stretched by Dave Willis and the leadership team to take on a broader perspective and think about ERP all up and lead our ERP business in the US for a couple of years. And then, at the time, one of the big things Microsoft is focused on is grooming their employees to continue their journey and part of that is mentors and at the time, I had Doug Kennedy, who was the vice president of worldwide partners for dynamics as my mentor and he said to me in a meeting, he said, “Brent, we’re about to come out with this new product, Microsoft dynamics CRM online, we have no idea how partners are going to make money with it.”

And so, I took about a week following that conversation and he had offered me the role to kind of help kid of figure that out and during that week, I just sat there and thought about, what’s actually going to work? How is a partner going to adapt and make this transition over? And we came to the end of that week period and I said, “Doug, I have no idea how they’re going to make it, so I’ll take the job.” And we spent about six months working with partners who would deeply engage with us to pull apart their PNLs and understand the different variables, the different factors that would determine success or failure.

For example, how much could they spend on sellers in the cloud, because now that we move away from the bulge payment up front to the elongated revenue stream built around an annuity, how much could we invest up front from the sales and marketing capacity standpoint in order to be profitable? That was one of the many areas that we looked at and we stress tested those things with partners like Power Objects and Zero to Ten and others that had been around for a long time and we learned so much from that, that we went out and we wrote our very first guide to being profitable in the cloud and it was all focused around dynamics.

And I spent the better part of about 15 months traveling all over the world and meeting with great partners, sharing those learnings and insights and best practices that we had gathered with them and then, a former manager from my early days at Microsoft and said, “Hey, we’ve been watching what you’re doing with dynamics, what do you think about repeating that for Office 365 and kind of taking the helm of driving sales and strategy at a world wide basis for our Office 365 ambitions in the small and mid sized business base, SMB.”

And so, I couldn’t refuse the offer. It was a great challenge. And so I took that one and came over into the world-wide SNB team and worked for Thomas Hansen and David Smith. I did that about three and a half years and together, with our channel, there’s no way we could have done this without partners, but we took what was [inaudible 00:09:39] at the time, which was a bout a $50 million business and in three years, turned it into a $1.4 billion business. That’s just SMB.

Vince: Yeah, that’s amazing.

Brent: Yeah, if you put that in perspective, that would have been the … If SMB cloud would have been its own company, right, its own entity outside of Microsoft, it would have been the third fastest company in the history of the world to reach a billion dollars. That’s how powerful our channel is.

And so, I did that for about three and a half years and then, at the time, Til [inaudible 00:10:09] was a mentor of mine and he brought me over to his leadership team and the world-wide partner group, where my team led partner profitability, all the research that we do around that. We developed all the modern partner ebooks, those series. We led competitive recruitment and we got pretty good at convincing Google and Amazon and salesforce.com’s best partners to join our ecosystem. We had the original Azure PDMs that were around the world. And really had a lot of fun doing that job and learned a ton there and then wanted to get back out into the field and so two years ago, I moved back into the US business to where I am today.

Vince: And what was the best piece of advice you received when you came back in … or came into the field?

Brent: You know` it was more of a reminder than it was a piece of advice and it was to stay partner obsessed and to keep things simple. My biggest challenge that I have in my role today is really understanding the volume of stuff that comes out, whether it’s products or programs or initiatives or investments, and making it very clear for the PDMs on my team as well as the partners that we support to be successful and whittling it down to a consumable form factor so that they know what are the top two or three investments that tie to the practice that I’m building right now, because there’s many different practices that you could be building, to go out and be successful. And it’s that ability to not get so myopically focused on a single grain of sand on the beach, but to look at it in its entirety that has been something that I’ve brought back into my mindset and really tried to make sure that we stayed focused on. And demystification is kind of that core mantra that I have with my team so often.

Vince: So what are the things you share with partners to help them to be more profitable? What is the great nuggets of advice that you would share with them?

Brent: How much time do we have? That’s a good topic-

Vince: We could always do this as multiple podcast interviews.

Brent: Well, to me, there’s really four or five things that just stand out in every single conversation around this topic of profitability, and the biggest thing to me, and it starts here every single time. In conversation I have, this is the genesis of almost every one I have with partners is, you’ve got to figure out, in a ecosystem with more than 300 000 partners in it, you’ve gotta think about what makes you different, what makes you special, what’s your core DNA that you can build around? ‘Cause the biggest mistake that a partner can make is being too generalized or trying to become too opportunistic and chasing too many things because most partners that reside in the ecosystem today, they have anywhere from 10 to 100 employees. They can’t afford to chase 20 or more kind of things or try to build all these different practices for all these different verticals.

No, the best and most profitable partners, the ones with the healthiest PNLs, have a very strong differentiated value proposition and they’re better at it than anybody else, whether that’s Restaurant 365, you can guess where they go after based on their name. Whether that’s Keynote Cozy and their law firm focus, Elis Retail and their retail focus. Those high-end, highly profitable partners really understand that concept of differentiation.

The next piece that is really core and I would give this advice to any equity stakeholder in a partner, primarily in the C suite group is that we’ve got to make sure that we focus on working on the business and not just in it. So often, we get stuck in the day-to-day grind of running one of these companies, we forget to raise our head up and start to think about what metrics should we be focusing on? How are we performing against those metrics? What strategies do we need to tweak or change to make sure that we’ll preserve our success over the long-term and that we don’t run either into a plateau or a downward cycle in our business.

The third piece is all about having what I call a heavy paranoia for what’s next. And this is more important now than it’s ever been, because of the pace of change that’s being driven by the market, not necessarily Microsoft, but the market being the customer as well as the competitors that are out there today. Every day, there’s new entrants that are coming in. Every day there’s a new disruptor that’s happening somewhere and customers as well as partners are having to adapt to it so we’ve got to constantly be thinking about what piece do we need to add, not only to stay relevant, but to stay ahead of our competition.

And then that fourth piece, that fourth element of success, and that the greatest partners are really in tune with, is that they don’t rely on anyone else. They make sure that their success or failure is self-controlled. And what I mean by that is it’s great that vendors like Microsoft have programs and things like MDF to support you and other investments that we make but they consider that to be gravy or icing on the cake. They’re really, really good about controlling their own destiny, both in terms of the revenue line or the revenue composition that they have. One of the biggest thing that I coach partners through right now is if their overly pivoted on revenue coming form a vendor or the resell of a vendor’s product, that’s a problem because you’re going to be swayed by the margin or the incentives that that vendor is willing to provide. And that’s not just Microsoft, that’s anybody.

Vince: Right.

Brent: So at the end of the day, you want to make sure you have your own revenue, project services, managed services, your own IP, as the leading force and we use the vendor’s revenue stream as kind of that Trojan horse and that conduit to create that opportunity for you.

And then, the last one, that fifth element, that’s something that we focus on so often is don’t let yourself get stuck in the past. Business models just like we see with Netflix or you name whatever disruptor out there, they’re constantly changing their business models and some of the most aggressive and highly growing companies in our channel today challenge the status quo. I’ve seen all kinds of things, from New Age sellers to very interesting social tactics for marketing through to innovative ways that they deliver the services and technology. They’re not falling into the cycle of, well this has worked for me for five years or longer and that’s just the way that is. No, it’s never just the way that it is. You’ve constantly gotta be looking for ways to invent new opportunities for yourself and to question and challenge the way that things have been done for a long time.

Vince: Yeah, you bring up several key points here, in terms of how partners can stand out, that I love and I’ve shared some of these myself in some of the talks that I’ve given. But the one you just brought about … What I see partners doing, a lot of the partners I see, setting up and incubating new businesses, right, that they’ll try a few different things. They’ll test the market out for new and disruptive technologies and ideas and if they fly, they fly and they’ll grow the business form there. Have you seen that as well?

Brent: I have, but the most successful way of doing that is you’ve gotta take a first step, in my mind, which is having a conversation with your customers and os often people skip that step. They go and they see a flashy new technology or they hear a pressure point from a vendor and then they go out and they try to build something around it before they talk to their customers about, is this something that’s going to make sense for you? Does this land with you? And then the net result, the downside is, they either chase something that’s not going to be profitable for them or they position it and try to drive it in a way that’s just ultimately not going to resonate with the customer and they miss an opportunity.

Vince: You know, you’ve been talking about this disruption. We’ve all been talking about this disruption. It’s been happening, in fact, faster. I mean, you’ve been at Microsoft and in the channel for many years. I’ve seen it really accelerate. The pace has accelerated rapidly in the last 18 months or so. Would you agree?

Brent: I would. And it’s that pace of innovation that’s taking place today and it’s that desire from customers that need new types of solutions to remain competitive against the entities that are putting pressure on them and so they’re pushing the envelop faster and faster for us to keep up and then there’s these bit solutions that come in from competitors and we’re having to react to that and I think that’s here to stay. One of the greatest quotes I’ve heard from one of our leadership teams most recently is we need to get comfortable being uncomfortable. We’ve gotta constantly be thinking through, okay, what we have right now’s not good enough. We need to make sure that we’re adapting and molding over time.

Vince: So you mentioned speaking to customers, getting that feedback from customers about new opportunities for growth. What else can partners do to sustain the growth? Where do they need to invest in the next 18 months or so?

Brent: Well, one of the biggest areas is you’ve gotta understand and translate what those customers asks are and the needs are into the technology that’s coming about. You know, there’s so much desire right now for new areas related to machine learning, to analytics. Analytics is a huge one right now. There’s a lot of hunger for that out there but there’s a great shortage of ability and resources in the channel today to be able to deliver that, so that’s a big area. As we go forward, as well, we’ve got to think about turning on the engines that can attract and drive customer acquisition at a faster rate and this has a lot to do with the profitability and health of our partners business. That more and more we move away from those big upfront payments towards an elongated revenue stream, the more necessary it is for us to turn those engines on.

And the other thing that’s driving that is who the buyers are today. It used to be that the decision makers, they lied on the technical side. CIO, CTO controlled so much of the budget but in today’s world, roughly 80% of the budget is either owned or influenced by line of business executive and their needs are more immediate, there’s less patience there. They look for solutions that will solve maybe 80% of their problem, 90% of their problem. They can adapt around it as opposed to custom bespoke work that will be just right for what they need. And then they also want to solve smaller problems quickly because they’re, a lot of times, tied to revenue performance, right, as their driving factor in, so they need to get something more immediately done that way and then they go from there.

And so that creates a new challenge for our partners and for Microsoft. We’ve been going through this transformation as well, of being able to go out and have a conversation at the right level with a line of business executive and speak their vernacular and understand their drivers and how financially, this decision is either going to create upside in revenue or it’s going to control the downside of potential risk and productivity loss.

And those are big changes and challenges that we’re facing and going through right now, not only at Microsoft, but within our channel.

Vince: So what can partners do to better align to the line of business decision makers?

Brent: Well, it starts with that differentiation piece that we talked about earlier, right? When you create differentiation and you specialize around an area, you tend to be able to go deep and really understand, not just the vernacular that’s happening there, but you understand the challenges that are current and the ones that potentially are going to come in the future for that subsegment of the market. If you don’t have that knowledge and you’re having to learn on the fly, you can easily be outpaced by somebody that does or you’re going to fall victim to elongated sales cycles and more cost to go out and actually acquire that customer because you’re having to spend too much time learning.

So partners really need to be able to understand that. The more that they can do research and learn about the driving forces that are controlling that subsegment of the market is going to be huge as well. There’s all kinds of new requirements from a technology standpoint. It’s not just about GDPR and what’s going on but there’s ones that are very relevant to a particular vertical and area that they need to stay in touch with and can help the customer to understand how they as a provider and how the technology itself can get them through that change that’s happening in the industry.

So there’s a lot of little things around that topic that partners can do.

Vince: So I hear you speaking towards specialization, maybe even focus in on specific industry sectors and I know Microsoft is investing quite a bit now in industry. What do you see happening there and are there any use case examples you can point to?

Brent: Yeah, we have a very big focus there and we started that journey for us about 12 months ago in a way that we haven’t done before. We’ve always had some light traction in that regard but over the last 12 months we’ve really dug in deep. And in the US specifically, we’re doubling down right now. Toni Townes-Whitley, who led that from a global standpoint for Microsoft has actually moved over into the US business and she will lead our focus here for the US as we go forward. And there’s been a lot of great work from research through to aggregation of assets and tools that partners can use to where we can go partner with our channel to actually start to go out and drive that.

One of my favorite examples of resources to help partners in that way is what we call the book of dreams. And there’s a number of these that exist today and every one of them is focused around an industry, whether it be the airline industry or it’s healthcare, and what it does is it helps you as a partner to understand specifically what’s the market opportunity, how’s Microsoft value position, what tools and resources and programs are there to help you go out and attack that segment of the market. So we absolutely are there to help you in that way.

And then, I’m actually working with my team to help them ramp up their knowledge to where they can go out and speak the language of that industry with those partners and be in a better position to think about how they build practices around that using our technology.

Vince: A lot of great information there. So book of dreams is a new term for me. I know about solution maps. Maybe you can differentiate a little bit more, peel back a little bit more on the book of dreams and what solution maps are.

Brent: Well, for me, book of dreams takes the solution maps a step further. The solution maps help us to understand what those solutions look like, but the book of dreams go beyond that to talk about the value proposition, the programs and tools and resources that Microsoft makes available for you to actually go out and drive that opportunity in the market, so it’s something that I would consider a great augmentation to the solution maps and something that any partner that wants to think about becoming focused should take a look at.

Vince: And Brent, you’re going to provide a link to that for our listeners so they can view that information or digest that information in our show notes.

Brent: Yeah, I’m more than happy to do that.

Vince: Great. Thank you very much. So we talk about some of the technologies and I’ve been hearing a lot about AI and IOT, machine l;earning and the like. How are these technologies impacting or being put to use by your partners to drive transformation?

Brent: Well, it’s still early for some of these very advanced technologies, like the ones you called out there, but we’re starting to see partners consume and understand how to build practices around that and build that journey out. You know, we’ve developed things like the partner playbooks that can actually take a member of our ecosystem step-by-step through how to actually develop this practice. Everything from what services are available, what tools does Microsoft make available for you, all the way through to what should you be monetizing around this and giving you real-world examples of what Microsoft has done with that.

But we’re starting to see some partners find early success with it. We’ve got NathCorp as an example, out in Southern California, that’s in our portfolio, has built a very compelling solution for airlines and is now looking to take that even more broadly into the market.

One of my favorite partners in Colorado, SSB Info, has built a phenomenal analytics practice around Azure and some of these more advanced workloads that we have, and they now provide tremendous managed services around business intelligence and data warehousing out to professional sports teams, out to collegiates, universities, like the University of Texas and Arizona state. And then, beyond that, they’re looking at other verticals inside of healthcare, inside of government, where they can deliver these types of solutions. But it’s still … It’s not a pervasive thing widely across the channel yet so there’s a ton of opportunity, but I’m really excited about where it’s going to go.

And, you know, we’re even using it ourselves and building around it in my team. We built something just this last quarter called the growth propensity index and what it helps us to do is understand what are the leading indicators that are determining a partner’s propensity to continue on the growth trajectory that they’ve been on.

Vince: Wow.

Brent: Yeah, and if there’s some risk there, what can we do to help them, and we’re bringing in Azure and machine learning and I’ve got a couple of folks on my team that, as a side project, they’re deeply technical and passionate about this topic, they’re working through machine learning to perfect this algorithm, this model so that we can work with partners to either drive a continued success trajectory or work with them to correct any issues they have.

Vince: So growth propensity index. GPI.

Brent: GPI, that’s right.

Vince: And so you got … So you could have leading indicators, you could see if a partner’s lacking in an area, you can give them help specifically in that area if it needs attention?

Brent: That’s right.

Vince: That’s amazing. That’s something new for me. We’re going to peel back … That might be another podcast episode for us.

Brent: Happy to od it.

Vince: But we’ve got a really important timeline ahead of us. We’ve got Microsoft Inspire very soon and one of the reason why I asked you to join this podcast today is to share with our listeners what your thoughts are, why partners should attend Inspire and maybe some specific sessions they should attend or how they should focus their time at Inspire.

Brent: Sure. You know, I think this’ll be my 12th or 13th Inspire, even before it was called that, Worldwide Partner Conference, and even going back earlier than that. And to me, in all transparency, it’s my favorite week of the year. It’s a chance to go out and see face-to-face so many great partners that I’ve had the chance to meet and learn from and coach over the years in the channel and then beyond that, you think about the networking opportunity that exists out there today between Microsoft employees and members of our channel. There’ll be about 3000 Microsoft employees just at Inspire and so there’s all kinds of subject matter experts, all kinds of unique perspectives from around the world. Imagine sitting down if your a partner with the PDM for the fastest growing partner from Australia or the fastest growing partner from Singapore or the UK and learning from them. There’s so many ways to connect the dots and learn from so many people that you just can’t match that in any other week or any other location during the year.

And then, from our standpoint, this is where we share out to that channel what’s our agenda for the year. So the key notes that Judson and Satya will deliver are rich with our focus areas and kind of give you a chance to, well very bluntly, read the tea leaves of where our focus areas going to be and where you’ll want to align to maximize your success in the coming 12 months.

P2P has become really, really big, that peer to peer or partner to partner activity. I remember five or six years ago, we really struggled to get that actively off the ground, but we’re seeing a flurry of activity there now and this is where so many of those relationships are established, connections are made and revenue starts to be generated behind these engagements that happen at Inspire.

And then, if you’re thinking about an infinite set of opportunities to create monetization for your business, the expo floor, with all of the vendors and ISVs that are there that sell through a channel, it’s a great chance to go see, literally hundreds of them, see what they have to offer, see which ones make the most sense for you to bring into your portfolio to go out and sell.

And I think that last one is probably the most unique to this year. It’s the first time that we’re bringing together Inspire and Ready and I have the great benefit of attending both this year and they’re taking place largely in the same week and they’ll overlap for a couple of days there and there’ll be about 40 000 people between Inspire and Ready attendees in Las Vegas at the same time. So there you’ll have a chance to see and meet, not just our focus on the partner business but also our enterprise sellers and our territory channel managers and all kinds of even technical individuals that maybe you don’t have access to on a normal given day, that you can literally sit down face-to-face with and have a rich conversation about how do I engage with you, how can we partner together, how do I work with you to be brought into certain accounts. It’s a very rich environment to have a lot of important connections for the year.

Vince: Well like you, I’m very excited by this and this overlap with the two events, the Ready event, which we used to call MGX back in the day, and then having that overlap time, partners have always craved or had the desire to have the sales people, the feet-on-the-ground, talking to customers to connect with and collaborate with at the same event, so this is going to be a terrific week in Las Vegas for everyone.

Brent: Absolutely.

Vince: So for our listeners who want to engage with you and the team or maybe want to say hello to you at Inspire, what’s the best way for them to do so?

Brent: Well, Inspire, I’ll be around. I tend to be … Use that time to meet with partners as much as I can, so if I’m not sitting in a core note or we used to call a keynote, then I’m in dedicated meetings with partners, but I’ll be at the US celebration as well. A number of other events that are ongoing there. I’d love to bump into you, have a conversation with you. But outside of that week, you know, I’m very active on LinkedIn, that’s a great way for me to connect, so I’m more than happy to do so in that medium if that makes sense. Partners can plug in to a lot of the other great assets of communication streams that we have, whether it be the SMB insider community or one of our other MPN assets as well and that’s another way for you to reach me and I’m always available by email at bccombest@microsoft.com.

Vince: Great. Thank you very much, bRent, and thank you for taking the time today.it’s been a great discussion. Excited to be with you and with Microsoft at Inspire this year and thank you for joining.

]]>https://ultimateguidetopartnering.com/2018/07/10/58-focus-on-launching-successful-partner-business-models/feed/0For this special series of the podcast, leading up to Microsoft Inspire, I interview leaders from Microsoft's One Commercial Partner team to discuss the work that their teams are doing in this age of rapid digital transformation. - For this special series of the podcast, leading up to Microsoft Inspire, I interview leaders from Microsoft's One Commercial Partner team to discuss the work that their teams are doing in this age of rapid digital transformation.<br />
<br />
My guest for this episode is Brent Combest, the general manager of the US One Commercial Partner organization responsible for Microsoft Value-added Service Partners to build profitable practices with and through Microsoft.<br />
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Brent and I discuss the work his team does to help partners transform their businesses and build profitable and sustainable business models, his journey from the channel to Microsoft, and what's in store for partners July 15 through the 19th in Las Vegas, Nevada. And if you're coming to Inspire, please join me in the commons theater on Wednesday, July 18th at 2:30 for a special session where I'll share what they don't teach working with Microsoft.<br />
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You can listen to the podcast or view the transcript here or on iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, Google Play, Player FM, other Android podcast players.<br />
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As with each of my interview and articles, I appreciate your feedback. You can reach out to me on Linked In, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram or on email at vincem@cloudwavepartners.com. You can also review this podcast by going to iTunes and searching “Ultimate Guide to Partnering” and clicking on the album art and hitting the rating link. This helps others find the podcast.<br />
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Links discussed on the interview:<br />
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aka.ms/modernpartner<br />
Microsoft Partner Practice Development Playbooks https://partner.microsoft.com/en-US/campaigns/cloud-practice-playbooks<br />
Automotive Book of Dreams v1<br />
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TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW<br />
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Brent, welcome to the podcast.<br />
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Brent: Thanks for having me.<br />
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Vince: It is great to have you here. Thank you for taking time from your compressed schedule. You are the general manager in the One Commercial Partner team focused on helping value added service providers scale their business with and through Microsoft. I'm excited to hear from you about your organization's role and focus, how partners can maximize the results of their practice with Microsoft, your view on this amazing transformation, and what's in store for partners in Microsoft Inspire. So welcome.<br />
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Brent: Thank you very much. I'm happy to have this conversation. Some great topics there.<br />
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Vince: So first off, can you explain to our listeners, in simple terms, the role of your organization at Microsoft?<br />
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Brent: Sure. We reside inside of the One Commercial Partner organization here in the US and my team has 26 partner development managers inside of it and collectively, we look after about 650 partners from around the United States, some of the top partners that are driving our transformational cloud business. And our mission as a team is to help these partners develop modern practices that develop strong, sustainable growth in a very profitable way so that these partners are able to reinvest and create additional growth for the future.<br />
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Vince: So why is Microsoft investing in this team and at this time?<br />
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Brent: Well for us it all starts with our business model. Microsoft, for as long as I can remember has been a partner obsessed company. To the degree that we invest heavily in understanding our channel, what's driving success and wanting to share those best practices across the ecosystem. We invest as a company about a million dollars a year, just in research to understand what makes the best partners as great as they are. And then, from that, we take that knowledge and want to help others from across the ecosystem to flourish. And this is really the core of PDM does,Vince Menzione - Technology Industry Sales and Partner Executiveclean32:20
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#57 – Decoding the most important sessions delivered at Inspire, with Eduardo Kassnerhttps://ultimateguidetopartnering.com/2018/07/08/57-decoding-the-most-important-sessions-delivered-at-inspire-with-eduardo-kassner/
https://ultimateguidetopartnering.com/2018/07/08/57-decoding-the-most-important-sessions-delivered-at-inspire-with-eduardo-kassner/#respondSun, 08 Jul 2018 17:32:07 +0000https://ultimateguidetopartnering.com/?p=1520For this special series of the podcast, leading up to Microsoft Inspire, I interview leaders from Microsoft’s One Commercial Partner team to discuss the work that their teams are doing in this age of rapid digital transformation. I was delighted to welcome back to the podcast Eduardo Kassner, the Chief Technology and Innovation Officer for … Continue reading "#57 – Decoding the most important sessions delivered at Inspire, with Eduardo Kassner"

For this special series of the podcast, leading up to Microsoft Inspire, I interview leaders from Microsoft’s One Commercial Partner team to discuss the work that their teams are doing in this age of rapid digital transformation.

In this episode, Eduardo and I have a lively discussion on the state of disruption that is continuing in our industry, the work that his team has been doing to enable and ready partners to embrace the transformation, the amazing content and eBooks that they have been delivering that we all need to be aware of and have access to, and what’s in store for partners and some must attend sessions at Microsoft Inspire, July 15th through the 19th in Las Vegas, Nevada.

As with each of my episodes, I appreciate your support, please tell your friends about the podcast and where you can find us. And I’d love your feedback you can reach me at vincemenzione on linkedin twitter facebook and Instagram or at vincem@cloudwavepartners.com.

Want to provide the best Cloud Migration & Operations services? Come learn from the best practices and accelerate your success

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Thank you for listening and I hope you enjoy this episode.

Transcript of the Interview.

Eduardo, welcome back to the podcast.

Eduardo K.: Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be back.

Vince Menzione: I’m excited to have you back. I know how compressed your schedule is right now. This is a great time for a discussion about what your team’s been up to, and what’s going to happen at Inspire in Las Vegas. I’m happy to have you back right before the event this year.

Eduardo K.: Thank you so much. You’re absolutely right. It’s a race to Inspire at this point, but, it’s actually a really fun time. There’s a ton of innovation going on. A lot of movement. A lot of excitement, and really some cool plans for the next fiscal year, so thank you for having me. A pleasure to be here.

Vince Menzione: For our listeners who didn’t join us on episode 39, you’re the Chief Technology and Innovation Officer for the One Commercial Partner Organization, worldwide. I thought we’d start with a discussion on your team’s charter and mission.

Eduardo K.: Absolutely. Well, it’s expanded since last time we talked. That’s been great fun. We do five things. First, we do a lot of research that pertains to how partners are successful. It’s very interesting for me to talk about this topic, because, as you know, there’s a lot of research out there on the market size and the opportunities, but there’s very little research that says, “This is the type of customer that is looking for this type of solution. Partners usually are successful with this type of project, and then the leading and trailing project after that is this other service.” Or, “This other type of resources that you require to deliver this type of service.”

We do very detailed research in three ways. One is, we talk to the most successful partners out there. We spend a lot of time finding out who is doing great in any technology and any platform, not just Microsoft. We try to approach them and ask them how they do and how they do it. Then second, we do surveys, and we use a lot of the market leading research firms and conduct all this research. This educates our second effort, which is the partner profitability, which is the eBooks that are released, the digital Partner series, for which you can download the first eBook that we just released.

This is an evolution of what we released a year and a half ago, which was the Profitability series. Really cool eBooks that get you started on what’s the market opportunity, how should we be looking in this more for business leaders, looking at the investments that they want in the transformation of their business.

Vince Menzione: I remember those.

Eduardo K.: Those were actually pretty acclaimed. We’ve just released a new version. The first book. We are going to release a whole bunch more in Inspire of this eBook series.

Third, we go into practice development. Like I talked last time, for me profitability is a lot of fun, but not enough. Right? We need to go into the how. Just saying you are going to be profitable is exciting, but then everybody is going to ask you the next question. Nobody is going to stop with “Oh, okay.” That’s going to be cool, but how am I going to actually do that? How am I going to actually achieve that? The how becomes all the research I just told you plus massive amount of reviews we do internally Microsoft and with Partners.

We really take a lot of pride in working very closely with some of the thought leaders in all the market segments. I’m talking about ISBM, PSI, different regions, different sizes, different markets, different verticals, and we validate tremendously this content so it’s useful. Again, we do it not for entertainment but for usefulness. Right?

Vince Menzione: Right.

Eduardo K.: Is it practical? Does it actually help you build a better practice? Then I just was graced with the responsibility of leading all of the training and enablement motion of partners across Microsoft so we’ve got a brand new team. Super exciting and we are managing Partner University, the Learning Portal, the content for learning at the MPM website, and that’s a lot right there.

Vince Menzione: That’s massive and massively important right now. Right?

Eduardo K.: Yes, yes, yes.

Vince Menzione: During this transformation partners are all trying to figure this out and they need all the help they can get.

Eduardo K.: Exactly, and I’m deeply passionate about skills and skills development, so with that, the other part of that is I’m also in charge of all the field events we do for partners, so the investments, the management, how do we do them and the coordination. The coordination with our different subsidiaries. Then last but not least, I also lead some of the innovation projects that we’re doing as OCP onto either cloud migration or innovation, or AI, practice development or MSP to cloud MSP evolution, or ISV distribution channels to ISV SaaS and marketplaces.

The fifth one is really a little bit or more, because it’s how do we innovate and help our partners innovate, whether it be their business model, their technical delivery capabilities, or their technical depth. That’s it.

Vince Menzione: Yeah, that’s a lot more than just it. That’s an amazing portfolio of responsibility for the [inaudible 00:06:32]. It’s all around this disruption right?

Eduardo K.: Absolutely.

Vince Menzione: Partners need the help figuring it out. I’ve been talking about this disruption all this year, and you’ve been chronicalling this as well through some of the work you’ve been doing. In fact, I wanted to dive in here a little bit, because you and the team recently introduced a new eBook that you published this spring called Designed to Disrupt, and I wanted you to talk to our listeners a little bit about this eBook and we’ll also provide links for our listeners to find it.

Eduardo K.: Absolutely. I’m really excited about this. I’ve been hailing to the four wins that the way to look at cloud is not through the pieces [inaudible 00:07:10] functions of it. I keep saying it’s not about the Lego blocks. It’s not about you understanding the different components. You need to have a deep understanding of them, but it’s about what you can build with, and so most people don’t light up until you tell them, “Let me tell you a story of how somebody else did it.” And, “Let me tell you a story of how they did it.”

It’s a story of the what’s and a story of the how’s, and then a story of the why’s. We talked a little bit about this last time, but let me go into it again. It’s all about, if I tell you the story of how we helped on the recovery of the earthquake in Nepal, that via phone app, people could assess the damage of the properties. Send it to a central location. They could do a quick assessment and then prove the reconstruction or removal of debris. Disperse funds to that region, and then via queue cards on volunteers, people on the ground with cell phones could pay the volunteers.

Vince Menzione: Wow.

Eduardo K.: All this was a web app and done in weeks. That wakes you up because all of a sudden it took me a minute, a minute and a half perhaps, but you understood the web technology, you understood the impact, and I don’t know if you noticed, I didn’t have to tell you the why. I didn’t have to tell you it saved millions. It sped up the process tremendously, because the why was so impactful already that the what and the how took over, and the how was, “Oh, now I understand I need web apps and I need agility, and I don’t want to have a virtual machine, I’d rather have a pass offering for this, so maybe mobile apps and I need some load balancing, or I need this across regions, and this is going to be money so I need compliance for it.” All that came into the story, didn’t have to explain it.

Vince Menzione: Right.

Eduardo K.: What we started thinking, this is James [Farhad 00:08:54], Barry Briggs and myself, my two co-authors and myself is why don’t we write a book as a next version of Enterprise Cloud Strategy, which we did the second edition in February. Why don’t we write a book, and we started this early last year. Last fiscal year, sorry, so that it would chronicle 30, 40 stories of how people have done through the pillars of digital transformation. Empower their employees, enhance their products, enhance customer services, enhance their operations, but also we added a fifth pillar, which is cloud for good, which is what I just talked about.

Through those five how can you be telling the story of how people used all these cloud technologies that we’re hearing about to disrupt, to evolve, to transform for better their businesses. When we talk about the cloud computing revolution, we talk about the what and the how that transforms your business and the how transforms IT, because IT has been transformed and disrupted as well.

What’s really interesting is we talk about tales of digital transformation, and so we go into engaging customers, empower your employees, optimize your operations, transform your products, and like I said, digital technology for good. This all ends with what we call brainstorming your future, which is how you envision, how do you dream, design, deliver, right?

Eduardo K.: Yeah, you know the most important part of this is how do you unshackle yourself from this is how we do it today? And you say, “Okay, it’s not if you could start a new world what would you do?” That’s just simple. It’s a let’s look at it from two angles. I hope you find this super interesting because the two angles are very different. The first one says, look at your current process, at inefficiency, bureaucracies, gaps, and enhanced … you could say, “Well I don’t have something there.” Well you don’t have then something to substitute, so that works, right?

Vince Menzione: Right.

Eduardo K.: Just build something and you build something fast and that works really well, but sometimes you say well I have to change the whole system or that seems like a rewrite, that seems like a migration and every time you say that word, oh my God, you suck the air out of the room. It’s horrible. The point here it’s really fun because you say, “Well a lot of this disruption that’s happening, a lot of this innovation is on gaps. It’s on inefficiencies. It’s on things that just the system didn’t do it, so nobody thought of doing it, so we keep doing it the old way so now we have a hybrid of paper and human processes and computer systems the way they have evolved.” There’s inefficiencies in the system that can be enhanced. That’s the lower level. That’s the bottom up.

There’s also the top down which is if you would dream of the company again, which market would it address? Which services would it provide? Which mission would it accomplish? You’d say, “Oh my God, that’s another … that’s big thinking.” Well the bottom line can have so much stuff that it becomes big thinking too, so be careful.

Vince Menzione: Right.

Eduardo K.: The point is you’ve got to look at it from both angles. In some cases, one angle is more appropriate. Big consulting type. I don’t mean big consulting as you need a big consulting, but I mean as in you’re doing big consulting thinking. How do I re-envision the mission of the vision of the company? How do I re-envision how I sell? How do I re-envision which market I go to? That’s big thinking, but also a lot of small thinking becomes super critical because it ends up being big transformation. Both of them. We talk about both of them. The first one being the top down being dream, design, deliver and the bottom up being called envision.

Then how do you make the transformation happen and the disruption let it happen? On business, on technology and on economic benefits, and how do you measure it?

Super excited about the book. It is built for business decision makers on purpose, so the audience is … every IT person I think should read it because it educates us on how to talk to the business side, but it’s written for the business, not for IT people, because I think they’re the ones who are the new key stakeholders that will decide how big we go with technology.

Vince Menzione: Yeah, agreed and those are the people making some of these technology decisions or disruption decisions that are happening right now.

Eduardo K.: 45% according to leading analysts.

Vince Menzione: Yup, and probably growing at this point. We could probably spend this entire podcast discussing this. We’re going to provide links in the show notes, and maybe we’re going to come back for another episode and just do a deep dive here, but we also have Inspire coming up so I want to talk about the event and some of the compelling sessions you and team are organizing around. Some of the topics that come to mind for customers and partners are around things like cloud migration, AI, the skills gap. I want to peel back with you on each of these topics as they’re incredibly compelling right now given the state of the business transformation and all three topics are ones that partners should really, deeply care about right?

Eduardo K.: Absolutely. Absolutely. Look the first session … we’re doing four sessions, seven workshops, three breakouts. My team and I are doing a lot of good stuff at Inspire, and it’s a big event for us, but I’ll just cover the four big ones that we’re going to be talking about.

I will be, starting on Monday, 16, with a session called, Are You Ready to Capture the Artificial Intelligence Opportunity? It’s very exciting for me to talk about AI, because there’s a lot of really cool stuff that we’ve been doing there. The first thing is we launched a playbook for AI. Playbook has been incredibly well received. We spent a ton of time validating the content, making sure that it was useful. Not just from people who are doing it and being successful, but from people who are starting a desire to grow in this space. We validated it as in, “Does this really help you or do you need different topics?” We actually went and wrote everything that was needed.

It goes very deep into how to define the strategy for a successful AI practice. Whether you are using this to enhance your services and products. Right, whether your and ISV and you just want to embed some AI into your product, or whether you’re an existing SI practice and you’re building an application for somebody and you want to embed some AI into it. Whether you’re building a full AI service, or you’re doing some big data analysis and insight, and you want to do some exploration and some learning and then gather from that some more advanced insight, or whether you’re building a full model and custom algorithm. The first thing that we learned through this for the AI session and the workshop is that there are pretty much four stages that we see partners using AI. Again, it’s very exciting because most people come in and say, “Oh my God, AI, I need some math PhD’s. I need some big data scientists. This is going to be impossible. That talent is super hard to get. I don’t know how I’m going to address this. This needs some PhD math level understanding. Too much.”

Vince Menzione: Right, that’s how I think about AI. I think about how do I go do this? Can I do this or do I have to hire or plug in another application to do it.

Eduardo K.: I’m sorry to say this Vince, but absolutely wrong approach. Completely, 100% wrong approach. AI starts with using a chat bot which is fairly simple. You can write an FAQ, you give it to the FAQ chat bot that we have and it converts her into a working chat bot that can answer questions. You can imbed AI fairly simple.

The first stage is a chat bot and cognitive services. We have a ton of cognitive services and with their own vision for language, for text, for knowledge, you can use them and they’re APIs. If you have a good developer, they can learn how to use these APIs fairly simple. It’s not a fathomable task. It’s not something that requires a ton of learning curve. My point is the first stage is fairly simple and as long as you have a good developer you can use it to enhance your products, your services, et cetera.

The second level would be custom models. Custom models is where you start thinking about big data, or you start thinking about who owns the data. It’s really important that you understand who owns the data and who cares about the insight of that data. That’s where you bring in perhaps a data scientist, but more in the sense of somebody that understands big data and that’s where you get into data cleansing, data scrubbing. Perhaps managing data holes or biases. That’s where you do modeling.

Vince Menzione: Okay.

Eduardo K.: Then the third level is where you do custom algorithms. That is where you get into some good math, and you know fair, you may need more depending on how deep you want to go. Insurance companies are investing in this deeply and financial institutions, and healthcare, et cetera, so it’s fun. Genomics, you’re not going to do genomics easy way. There’s no easy way to do genomics, but we already have a tool kit, an API, but of course, if you’re already doing genomics, you’re already in the topic right?

Vince Menzione: Absolutely.

Eduardo K.: That takes you to the fourth pillar, which is not the hardest on the scale. I would call this another access which is your depth on a certain vertical. If you’re really deep on financial, or in insurance, or on churn for retail. Then that drives your conversation to go deeper into these topics, but then again, you have the three scales. You can start with a chat bot, you can go to modeling, you can go to advanced algorithms. I hope that this shows you we’ve done a lot of work. We have built really good playbook. At the session I’m going to showcase two amazing companies and how they use AI. One is a systems integrator and they do some incredible envisioning, and the second one is a really cool ISV who does some amazing, amazing … they have a hypothesis engine that does hypothesis on data. You just point it to data and it generates hypothesis on it. There’s some really cool stuff happening in the market here and that’s going to be our first topic.

Vince Menzione: That’s going to be a general session. That’s going to be on Monday. We’re going to provide links to that, and like I said, to me this is the hot topic at Inspire. I think AI is probably the biggest topic for all of the partners, all the people that are going to be attending Inspire.

Eduardo K.: Absolutely. The second session I’m presenting is … there’s no order here. There’s no order of importance. I’m just listening them as they happen. The second one is dearest and nearest topic to my heart called Learn Best Practices for Finding and Retaining Technical Talent.

Vince Menzione: Yup.

Eduardo K.: This goes into a playbook that we’re working on, that we plan to release after Inspire. We’re still working on the exact that. Look Vince, we’ve all talked about the war on talent. You don’t like the way I said that.

Vince Menzione: I know, but it’s so true right now. I mean I talk to partners. I find that it’s so hard to find great talent. Hundreds of thousands of jobs in the United States are having difficulty attracting, hiring, onboarding and retaining that talent today. Yeah.

Eduardo K.: Worldwide. Worldwide, and I’ll tell you something. I said war on talent to be provocative, but I could call it skills gap. I could call it anything we’ve called it, but it’s right, it’s hard to recruit, attract, recruit a hire and it seems like we’ve never talked about in that detail because I don’t think we’ve ever been challenged in it, but again, attract, recruit, hire talent, onboard, develop it, retain it and grow it. The session is exactly about best practices. We’ve been talking to about 50 companies and ourselves on how we do this. We’ve captured best practices. We have per each one of the most sought after roles we have job descriptions. We have methods that people use. Where do they detect the talent and attract it from? Best practices to hire. Best practices to onboard. How do they develop it? And also best practices on how they keep it, retain and build the community within their company. Super exciting topic. Big topic to wrangle in one hour.

Vince Menzione: Really important. I called AI the hot topic, but this one is core to the business, and all of our partners are struggling with. I think it’s a bigger issue candidly around all our education here in this country. Are we providing the right education and format to make our students when they get out of school have it so they have the right skills in order to be in these jobs that need to be filled.

Eduardo K.: Fascinating that you say that, because for me, it’s four angles and I hope that this sparks new thoughts on you and on the listeners that we have. The first one is yes, you have to generate new talent, which means how do we education our students to grow from middle school, right?

Vince Menzione: Yup.

Eduardo K.: Through high school and through college to understand the technical skills that are required to be successful in the future, and the technical skills are not longer going to be just, “I need data scientists.” Which are the hardest to find right now. No, no, no. I’m talking about everybody needs some advanced Excel, right?

Vince Menzione: Exactly.

Eduardo K.: Everybody needs some advanced scheduling and program management and project management capabilities in order to succeed today. Everybody needs collaboration skills, and understanding how to use different platforms. We weren’t born in an era where you collaborated in a team site as well as in a portal, as well as in electronic communications and email. We’re growing naturally into that world and our kids are, but the question is, are they being efficient, are they being effective and are we teaching them how to progress, automate and enhance this type of services. It’s fascinating to me how AI is making it’s way naturally into some of these conversations in a very simple way and people are using it, like [inaudible 00:21:54] analysis or advanced visualization on the guest list of a wedding which I saw the other day and it surprised the living daylights out of me, but, to each his own. My point is it’s getting embedded into our day-to-day.

Now, this is not the fascinating one, because for me, somebody that comes right out of college doesn’t know how to manage a production workload, doesn’t understand social impact, has not managed complex budgets. Has not managed key stakeholders or virtual teams, so there’s some social skills, there’s some project management skills, there’s some coordination skills and there is some production skills, whether you want to go very technical. Have you managed repositories, have you managed collaboration, have you managed sprints of development? The point is whether you want to go very technical or you want to go business management, you want to go program management, it doesn’t matter.

Vince Menzione: Right.

Eduardo K.: You have the need for advanced skills that don’t come out of college.

Vince Menzione: That’s right.

Eduardo K.: The importance of having experience together with education is one. I said four. I’ll go fast. Two is there’s a ton of professionals out there which we are all hiring. This is not Microsoft’s going to hire them for me. No, we’re all hiring them and training them because the current company has not trained them for years, and then when we say, “Hmm, we need someone with some job experience and we can train them for the rest.” Well you got them. We got them.

The point is, why aren’t we developing this amazing set of professionals that exists within the talent pool today that have experience in everything I said in bullet number one?

Vince Menzione: Good point.

Eduardo K.: We need to develop the existing talent that we have, and we need to find learning paths that evolves them and enhances them into being able to not only efficient, but innovative and transformative in this cloud era.

Then the third one is, there’s a tremendous amount of population coming from military and other populations that is just amazing. Their disciplined. Their smart.

Vince Menzione: Leadership skills I call them.

Eduardo K.: They have tremendous leadership skills. Exactly, and so we have a very successful program which I will highlight in my session of how to re-skill existing people from military who want to go into the private sector, and then grow their career there.

Vince Menzione: Yup. It’s led by my good friend Chris [Corques 00:24:02] in fact, at Microsoft.

Eduardo K.: There you go. There you go, and so him among others yes. It’s actually very interesting to hear about how some companies are taking really good advantage of this incredible and exciting population of really highly skilled professionals that again, don’t have that large of a delta to be ready to transact into the cloud and be successful, or into [inaudible 00:24:24].

Then the last and the fourth one, because I’m sure I’m surprised you by now, or I hope I have, is there’s a lot of people not quite ready to retire or that have lost their job because companies have gone down or et cetera, so not because of any performance issue or personal issue, but that have the right skills and again, could be re-skilled into the cloud fairly easy. I’ve seen some really interesting programs for instance from companies, from India all the way to New Jersey of how they go into unemployment offices and find the right talent, and then interview them and do internships for six, nine months. Develop the talent, hire it and become wildly successful.

Vince Menzione: I love that topic. That’s a great topic.

Eduardo K.: My point is, we have to stop being so monolithic in our thinking on, “Oh, we’ve got to hire only from this population.” Anyone that I said. It’s actually a complex problem and we have to be creative, and the ones who are being most creative and their developing their own talent as well as generating new pools of talent are the ones being most successful.

Vince Menzione: I think people try to simplify that topic and to your point, it’s much more complex than most people imagine.

Eduardo K.: You know what, I set myself up for some crazy cool challenge on this one, because first of all, 45 minutes for both topics is a hard one already. Right?

Vince Menzione: Yup.

Eduardo K.: Migration and operations, but I’ll tell you something, we’re about to release … actually we’re going to launch on Inspire The Cloud Migration Playbook. It is a rethinking. We had the Cloud Infrastructure Playbook. We rethought that space and we’re going to reduce the scope of The Cloud Infrastructure Playbook significantly because we are, like I said, we’re writing this Cloud Migration Playbook which we’re going to launch at Inspire, and then trailing that we’re going to develop into Q1 a cloud operations playbook, but very big topics. We did a ton of research on this. We found not only what’s the process, the method, the positioning, the envisioning, the assessment of migration, but also the process for actual migration for setting up the subscriptions management best practices for optimization and then automation as well as resiliency. Then the trail off is how do you set up a successful MSP practice. Right?

Vince Menzione: Right.

Eduardo K.: Which is going to be the lesser scope for the session. It’s going to be the last piece of it, but the biggest piece is the front end that I just mentioned. Then we have workshops on every topic I just mentioned. There’s going to be workshops there. There are smaller rooms so I encourage everybody to sign up soon. There’s a whole bunch of really interesting sessions that we’re doing. These are the main ones. We have about 22 partner meetings and a couple of panels. Looks like it’s going to be a very busy week.

Vince Menzione: It’s going to be a very busy week for you my friend. We’re going to provide a link. In our link we’re going to have all of this information. All the sessions listed. I can’t wait to see this Cloud Migration Playbook myself. I think this is a very fascinating topic, because we try to make it a generic … Cloud migration, okay what does that mean? It means so many different things depending on what cloud. What do you migrating?

Eduardo K.: You know what, you said something key there. A lot of people just bundle it up, but if you want to unbundle that to the first click, it’s an infrastructure app innovation, or app migration, or app rethinking, and the data migration. Just by saying that, you’re absolutely right. It has such a big bundle that people don’t necessarily double click on and when we started double clicking we found so much goodness.

Vince Menzione: Well we’re thankful to have you and your team here to help our partners. You are a tremendous resource to those partners, and I’m just curious, it’s been about six months since the last time we chatted. What are some of the new and more fascinating things you’ve seen happen since we last spoke in terms of industry trends? Partner use case examples? You gave us a couple examples earlier, but I’m just curious what’s top of mind for you?

Eduardo K.: Well it resounds on the three topics we mentioned and the evolution of the business model of our partners. If you think about the three topics that we talked about, right, we talked about four if you wish. We talked about the evolution of people in their utilization of cloud technologies, whether that be migration, operation, et cetera.

The second being data, big data and visualization in AI. Right?

Vince Menzione: Yup.

Eduardo K.: The third one being the skills, the challenge and how people are evolving and developing their people, and developing their work habits, and developing their collaboration methods, and rethinking how their skilled labor force enables them to develop new services. It all points to the fourth, which is, how does this transform their business, and so for me it’s been fascinating to see the actual effect on the market. The effect of the how does the embedding some AI to fully creating new AI, to visions, practices, companies, subsidiaries, some of our partners have evolved. It’s been fascinating to see how business that were based on PRIM, delivering on PRIM, operations on PRIM, facilities management are looking into embedding in cloud, whether it be for management security compliance or even for migration and operations, and how that affects their business, their P&L. Their envisions of their success in the future. Some are cannibalizing their existing product lines, service lines to build new ones.

Some are organically building different ones and enhancing. Some are just flat out right creating new companies on the side and seeing which one succeeds. It’s really cool not to stand on the sidelines but to actually see it firsthand. I’ve been working very closely with I would dare say over 25 companies, and very closely I mean constantly in talking to them and helping them re-envision their business, re-envision their services, talking to their technical teams and in many cases talking to their customers and understanding how their successful. It’s not trivial what’s happening. It is a restructuring and re-envisioning of our success in the market. All of our success, and so what I’m very proud to say is that we only envision our success with our partners. It’s absolutely an honor and a pleasure to have collaborated, and to continue to collaborate so close with them. Learn from them and grow with them.

That’s the key to our success. I don’t foresee a future where we’re not doing this as a community, and where we’re not doing this together. I think that’s the key to success literally and nothing else.

Vince Menzione: With all of those partners that you spend time with and you interview and you basically distill their success strategies, is there one thing that stands out that you believe is true to why they become successful both in their business and how they partner with Microsoft?

Eduardo K.: Yeah, I think that I said it in the previous sentences. It’s the spirit of collaboration. It’s the spirit of joint success. It’s the spirit of let’s do this together. The days of you give me the flour and I bake the bread, and you don’t care about how I do it, and this is my secret sauce and stay away from me, and I know how to do this, and they don’t also. That can be both ways too. To the customer, to the partner, to the ecosystem, to the supplies.

Vince Menzione: Yup.

Eduardo K.: I think that is very clearly not working, and so what’s really accelerating the ones that we’re seeing growing tremendously are the ones who look for opportunities to partner, look for opportunities to do joint development, joint investment, joint growth. They do this with us, they do this with their customers, they do this to other partners, and they find ways to be successful by enabling others, and so we’re following that equation to the T, if you notice, and we’re learning a lot by doing it. It’s a completely different spirit. I think we had all become very used to, I give you something, I drop it over the wall and then thank you, and I’m not talking about Microsoft, I’m talking about the whole industry.

Vince Menzione: That’s fantastic. Really great insights Eduardo, just terrific. You know, you obviously have all these great insights and things. I know you’re a continual student in terms of what you’re doing. What books are inspiring you as you’re heading into this new fiscal year at Microsoft?

Eduardo K.: Well there’s a book that I really recommend. It’s called The Future Computed. It’s a book that we released. Brad Smith and Harry Shum providing the forward for this. It talks about AI. It talks about the ethics on AI. I’m quite fascinated on the big data AI topic right now. I’m reading a couple of books on it, but this is the first one I’d highly recommend.

Vince Menzione: The Future Computed. We’re going to make sure we have a link to that in our show notes.

Eduardo K.: I was proud to say that I wanted to admit something in a pod cast. Not something we should do publicly. I’m rereading my science fiction with my 15 year old, alongside with him, so don’t tell anybody, but some good Isaac Asimov didn’t hurt anybody. We’re going through foundation series again.

Vince Menzione: He was fascinat … You know he wrote over 400 books in his … I mean it’s amazing.

Eduardo K.: Well I’ll tell you something. Nothing like re-reading something you read when you were growing up with your kid and the impressions that you see that’s causing on him and my memories of when I read the book. Fascinating stuff.

Vince Menzione: Well it’s fascinating times that we live in as well. Thank you for being along on the journey with us at The Ultimate Guide to Partnering. For our listeners who want to engage with you and the team, what’s the best way for them to reach out?

Eduardo K.: Well I’m always accessible. Eduardok@microsoft.com You can reach us out. You can reach us through the blog that we publish, through MPN, or just approach us at Inspire. We have a booth. We have sessions. It’s always a pleasure to talk to any of you.

Vince Menzione: Well I’m excited to sit in on your sessions. I will be there. I’m going to try to make all three of these sessions that you’ve referenced and I know that there are some other break outs as well. I hope our partners can join us. Looking forward to an exciting Inspire with Eduardo. Thank you for joining us today.

In this series of the podcast, I sit down with industry leaders to explore the digital transformation disrupting almost every industry.

My guest for this episode is Nick Leimer, Principle Industry Lead for Azure Insurance at Microsoft. Nick is part of a newly formed “outreach and connection” team tasked with championing the Azure platform to support digital transformation and cloud technology for the insurance industry.

Many traditional industries are undergoing a digital transformation, and insurance is no exception. Insurance has been around for a few hundred years. Now — thanks to cloud computing, machine learning, artificial intelligence, advanced analytics capabilities and other transformative technologies — insurance companies can more accurately model risk, customize pricing and better meet the needs of a transforming market.

In this interview, Nick and I discuss the evolution of the insurance industry and how cloud computing has been an important sea change to the industry. We discuss “InsurTech” and how technology advancements like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, the internet of things (IoT) and other technologies are driving both the capture and processing of data that goes into insurance models and the delivery of services to customers.

During the discussion, Nick points out the increasing demand for complex data analysis and predictive modeling coming from this market, and how Microsoft Azure’s rapidly expanding platform offers some compelling tools to propel insurance into the future.

Nick also sheds some light on how insurance organizations are embracing new technologies in creative and practical ways. Some customers are using bots to assist with external and internal workflows, such as helping customers select the right insurance plan. There are also layers of machine learning to support the whole value chain, not just sales. Nick shares an example of machine learning to assist with real-time claims processing, risk modeling and pricing strategies as new information comes into the system.

In the future, Nick anticipates that these intelligent approaches to risk modeling and pricing will become even more refined. He gives us a couple examples:

Employers will more widely offer insurance discounts to employees based on their activity levels as tracked by wearables

IoT sensors in cars can help decrease risks on the road and will help customize policies based on who is driving and how often

According to Nick, the more data insurance companies can gather, the more personalized insurance policies will become through real-time risk assessment.

We dove into the hot topic of AI or Artificial Intelligence. AI is supporting processing by gathering all the data from customer-facing bots and IoT sensors and can perform modeling based on data coming in from these channels to flip claim processing on its head. Nick explains that AI is helping insurance companies with claim mitigation by using predictive and preventative maintenance, rather than after an event occurs. This trend has been around for a while on the commercial side, but as smart home and smart car technology becomes more ubiquitous, Nick predicts we will soon see this trend expand into the consumer insurance space as well.

Nick also shares some excellent advice for customers and partners that are interested in entering the “InsurTech” space via Azure. Microsoft is continually building new toolsets on the Azure platform, like blockchain, in addition to enhancing the other intelligent technologies of AI, IoT and machine learning. Given how integral these technologies are becoming for the insurance sector, there’s significant potential for partners to get involved. Continue to watch this space — Nick and his team are creating additional documentation and resources for partners and customers to support the digital transformation of the insurance industry.

]]>https://ultimateguidetopartnering.com/2018/07/05/56-smart-tech-supports-flexible-responsive-and-intelligent-insurance/feed/0Industry Experiences: Smart Tech Supports Flexible, Responsive and Intelligent Insurance, with Nick Leimer - In this series of the podcast, I sit down with industry leaders to explore the digital transformation disrupting almost every industry. - Industry Experiences: Smart Tech Supports Flexible, Responsive and Intelligent Insurance, with Nick Leimer<br />
<br />
In this series of the podcast, I sit down with industry leaders to explore the digital transformation disrupting almost every industry.<br />
<br />
My guest for this episode is Nick Leimer, Principle Industry Lead for Azure Insurance at Microsoft. Nick is part of a newly formed “outreach and connection” team tasked with championing the Azure platform to support digital transformation and cloud technology for the insurance industry.<br />
<br />
Many traditional industries are undergoing a digital transformation, and insurance is no exception. Insurance has been around for a few hundred years. Now — thanks to cloud computing, machine learning, artificial intelligence, advanced analytics capabilities and other transformative technologies — insurance companies can more accurately model risk, customize pricing and better meet the needs of a transforming market.<br />
<br />
In this interview, Nick and I discuss the evolution of the insurance industry and how cloud computing has been an important sea change to the industry. We discuss “InsurTech” and how technology advancements like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, the internet of things (IoT) and other technologies are driving both the capture and processing of data that goes into insurance models and the delivery of services to customers.<br />
<br />
During the discussion, Nick points out the increasing demand for complex data analysis and predictive modeling coming from this market, and how Microsoft Azure’s rapidly expanding platform offers some compelling tools to propel insurance into the future.<br />
<br />
Nick also sheds some light on how insurance organizations are embracing new technologies in creative and practical ways. Some customers are using bots to assist with external and internal workflows, such as helping customers select the right insurance plan. There are also layers of machine learning to support the whole value chain, not just sales. Nick shares an example of machine learning to assist with real-time claims processing, risk modeling and pricing strategies as new information comes into the system.<br />
<br />
In the future, Nick anticipates that these intelligent approaches to risk modeling and pricing will become even more refined. He gives us a couple examples:<br />
<br />
Employers will more widely offer insurance discounts to employees based on their activity levels as tracked by wearables<br />
IoT sensors in cars can help decrease risks on the road and will help customize policies based on who is driving and how often<br />
<br />
According to Nick, the more data insurance companies can gather, the more personalized insurance policies will become through real-time risk assessment.<br />
<br />
We dove into the hot topic of AI or Artificial Intelligence. AI is supporting processing by gathering all the data from customer-facing bots and IoT sensors and can perform modeling based on data coming in from these channels to flip claim processing on its head. Nick explains that AI is helping insurance companies with claim mitigation by using predictive and preventative maintenance, rather than after an event occurs. This trend has been around for a while on the commercial side, but as smart home and smart car technology becomes more ubiquitous, Nick predicts we will soon see this trend expand into the consumer insurance space as well.<br />
<br />
Nick also shares some excellent advice for customers and partners that are interested in entering the “InsurTech” space via Azure. Microsoft is continually building new toolsets on the Azure platform, like blockchain, in addition to enhancing the other intelligent technologies of AI, IoT and machine learning. Given how integral these technologies are becoming for the insurance sector, there’s significant potential for partners to get involved.Vince Menzione - Technology Industry Sales and Partner Executiveclean34:01
<iframe src="https://player.blubrry.com/?media_url=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.blubrry.com%2Funofficalguidetopartnering%2Fcontent.blubrry.com%2Funofficalguidetopartnering%2FNick-Combined_Episode-w-o-clip.mp3&amp;podcast_link=https%3A%2F%2Fultimateguidetopartnering.com%2F2018%2F07%2F05%2F56-smart-tech-supports-flexible-responsive-and-intelligent-insurance%2F" scrolling="no" width="100%" height="138px" frameborder="0" id="blubrryplayer-5"></iframe>
# 55 – Breakthrough Cloud Solutions Make Manufacturing Cool Againhttps://ultimateguidetopartnering.com/2018/07/03/55-breakthrough-cloud-solutions-make-manufacturing-cool-again/
https://ultimateguidetopartnering.com/2018/07/03/55-breakthrough-cloud-solutions-make-manufacturing-cool-again/#respondTue, 03 Jul 2018 18:55:49 +0000https://ultimateguidetopartnering.com/?p=1457Industry Experiences: How Cloud Solutions Make Manufacturing Cool Again with Diego Tamburini. In this series of the podcast, I sit down with industry leaders to explore the digital transformation disrupting almost every industry My guest for this episode of the podcast is Diego Tamburini, Principal Industry Lead for Azure Manufacturing at Microsoft. In this new role, … Continue reading "# 55 – Breakthrough Cloud Solutions Make Manufacturing Cool Again"

Industry Experiences: How Cloud Solutions Make Manufacturing Cool Again with Diego Tamburini.

In this series of the podcast, I sit down with industry leaders to explore the digital transformation disrupting almost every industry

My guest for this episode of the podcast is Diego Tamburini, Principal Industry Lead for Azure Manufacturing at Microsoft. In this new role, Diego is the Azure advocate supporting cloud solutions and digital transformation for customers in the manufacturing industry.

Manufacturing has been a key industry for Microsoft for several years, in this new role Diego and the team are focused on engagement with customers to explore and implement innovative cloud solutions. This goes beyond the traditional cloud offerings of storage, collaboration, messaging and productivity — the value-added functionality of the Azure platform is transforming how manufacturing companies meet current and future demand using toolsets like “internet of things” (IoT), big data analytics, machine learning, high-performance computing, and blockchain on the Azure platform.

Diego shares how these innovative technologies are being applied in the manufacturing industry, from design and prototyping all the way through production. In particular, Diego is seeing compelling applications of digital technologies to address tasks such as:

Predictive maintenance

Optimization and quality assurance

Generative design

Supply chain optimization

Diego peels back here on how IoT provides manufacturing customers with invaluable data in terms of optimization, operations and supply chain efficiency. From sensors on the production line all the way to how customers are using the end product, there is now more data available throughout the product lifecycle.

Diego and I consider how machine learning and AI link into all that valuable IoT data to uncover patterns, trends or anomalies that may otherwise go unnoticed. With petabytes of information coming in from the shop floor and the finished product, machine learning translates that data into meaningful business insights. Ultimately, this empowers manufacturing customers to make better decisions and seize new opportunities.

Next, Diego discusses the applications of blockchain technology within manufacturing. The secure, trusted, distributed ledger model of blockchain is a valuable approach to some manufacturing scenarios, such as tracking:

Product lifecycle

Product traceability

Contractual obligations

We also discuss how blockchain can be useful for product verification by ensuring physical parts are paired with the relevant digital details to support anti-counterfeiting initiatives.

Diego and I explore how Azure brings together these capabilities, and more, onto one platform. Manufacturing spans a wide array of sectors, from defense to consumer goods, and Azure supports any of these scenarios. With over 70 compliance certifications, including ITAR and GDPR, Azure covers more regions than any other cloud provider. Azure also offers manufacturing customers with secure, industry-specific features and capabilities. Diego also reminds us that Azure supports open source, which means developers can easily build customized solutions on the platform.

We also discuss the opportunity for partners interested in working with manufacturing customers. ISVs, system integrators and start-ups with solutions for manufacturing customers can benefit greatly from Microsoft Azure’s enablement, go-to-market support and tapping into the Microsoft vast manufacturing customer base.

]]>https://ultimateguidetopartnering.com/2018/07/03/55-breakthrough-cloud-solutions-make-manufacturing-cool-again/feed/0Industry Experiences: How Cloud Solutions Make Manufacturing Cool Again with Diego Tamburini. - In this series of the podcast, I sit down with industry leaders to explore the digital transformation disrupting almost every industry - Industry Experiences: How Cloud Solutions Make Manufacturing Cool Again with Diego Tamburini.<br />
<br />
In this series of the podcast, I sit down with industry leaders to explore the digital transformation disrupting almost every industry<br />
<br />
My guest for this episode of the podcast is Diego Tamburini, Principal Industry Lead for Azure Manufacturing at Microsoft. In this new role, Diego is the Azure advocate supporting cloud solutions and digital transformation for customers in the manufacturing industry.<br />
<br />
Manufacturing has been a key industry for Microsoft for several years, in this new role Diego and the team are focused on engagement with customers to explore and implement innovative cloud solutions. This goes beyond the traditional cloud offerings of storage, collaboration, messaging and productivity — the value-added functionality of the Azure platform is transforming how manufacturing companies meet current and future demand using toolsets like "internet of things" (IoT), big data analytics, machine learning, high-performance computing, and blockchain on the Azure platform.<br />
<br />
Diego shares how these innovative technologies are being applied in the manufacturing industry, from design and prototyping all the way through production. In particular, Diego is seeing compelling applications of digital technologies to address tasks such as:<br />
<br />
Predictive maintenance<br />
Optimization and quality assurance<br />
Generative design<br />
Supply chain optimization<br />
<br />
Diego peels back here on how IoT provides manufacturing customers with invaluable data in terms of optimization, operations and supply chain efficiency. From sensors on the production line all the way to how customers are using the end product, there is now more data available throughout the product lifecycle.<br />
<br />
Diego and I consider how machine learning and AI link into all that valuable IoT data to uncover patterns, trends or anomalies that may otherwise go unnoticed. With petabytes of information coming in from the shop floor and the finished product, machine learning translates that data into meaningful business insights. Ultimately, this empowers manufacturing customers to make better decisions and seize new opportunities.<br />
<br />
Next, Diego discusses the applications of blockchain technology within manufacturing. The secure, trusted, distributed ledger model of blockchain is a valuable approach to some manufacturing scenarios, such as tracking:<br />
<br />
Product lifecycle<br />
Product traceability<br />
Contractual obligations<br />
<br />
We also discuss how blockchain can be useful for product verification by ensuring physical parts are paired with the relevant digital details to support anti-counterfeiting initiatives.<br />
<br />
Diego and I explore how Azure brings together these capabilities, and more, onto one platform. Manufacturing spans a wide array of sectors, from defense to consumer goods, and Azure supports any of these scenarios. With over 70 compliance certifications, including ITAR and GDPR, Azure covers more regions than any other cloud provider. Azure also offers manufacturing customers with secure, industry-specific features and capabilities. Diego also reminds us that Azure supports open source, which means developers can easily build customized solutions on the platform.<br />
<br />
We also discuss the opportunity for partners interested in working with manufacturing customers. ISVs, system integrators and start-ups with solutions for manufacturing customers can benefit greatly from Microsoft Azure’s enablement, go-to-market support and tapping into the Microsoft vast manufacturing customer base.<br />
<br />
If you’d like to learn more, check out:<br />
<br />
Microsoft for Discrete Manufacturing<br />
Azure for Manufacturing<br />
Azure Docs for Manufacturing<br />
Vince Menzione - Technology Industry Sales and Partner Executiveclean38:43
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# 54 – Practical Digital Transformation in Retail and Consumer Goodshttps://ultimateguidetopartnering.com/2018/07/02/54-practical-digital-transformation-in-retail-and-consumer-goods/
https://ultimateguidetopartnering.com/2018/07/02/54-practical-digital-transformation-in-retail-and-consumer-goods/#respondMon, 02 Jul 2018 11:00:03 +0000https://ultimateguidetopartnering.com/?p=1465Industry Experiences: Practical Digital Transformation in Retail and Consumer Goods, with Mariya Zorotovich. – In this series of the podcasts I sit down with industry leaders to explore the digital transformation disrupting almost every industry. In this episode I was delighted to spend time with Mariya Zorotovich, Worldwide Industry Lead for Azure Retail and Consumer … Continue reading "# 54 – Practical Digital Transformation in Retail and Consumer Goods"

Industry Experiences: Practical Digital Transformation in Retail and Consumer Goods, with Mariya Zorotovich. – In this series of the podcasts I sit down with industry leaders to explore the digital transformation disrupting almost every industry.

In this episode I was delighted to spend time with Mariya Zorotovich, Worldwide Industry Lead for Azure Retail and Consumer Goods at Microsoft. Mariya is a translator between the retail and consumer goods customer needs related to innovation and modernization of vertical capabilities and Microsoft’s technology agenda related to Azure cloud and AI technology. In this role, she articulates the benefits of Azure’s robust toolset to customers to address the unique business concerns and evolving demands of the retail and consumer goods industry.

As brick-and-mortar commerce melds with the digital world, the capabilities of Azure provide retailers with a set of powerful new tools, including advanced analytics, AI and machine learning. These new capabilities serve the organizations themselves, as well as improve the overall customer experience from sales to operations. According to Mariya, adoption of these technologies is expanding rapidly as companies who are “first to market” are seeing improved ROI for their organizations.

We discuss disruption in the retail and consumer goods industry, stemming from companies that are using non-traditional approaches to retail scenarios. Today, organizations are using intelligent technologies to build platforms and communities as a model for trade. Mariya recommends a practical approach to helping more traditional organizations truly transform in order to compete as this industry evolves.

Mariya sees a variety of technologies supporting unified commerce and consumer engagement. Machine learning and advanced analytics are particularly useful for retailers grappling with how to handle the large amounts of data gathered from the supply chain and from customers.

Mariya peels back on AI in particular. AI technology spurs some interesting trends for a variety of scenarios in commerce, including:

Price intelligence

Deriving insights from customer behavior and sentiment

Optimizing inventory

Innovative check-out scenarios

Mariya emphasizes that while retailers are intently focused on optimizing the customer experience on the front end, they need to equally focus on enhancing the capabilities of the organization on the back end, from fulfillment through the supply chain.

Mariya and I discuss the importance of leadership in transformation scenarios in the retail industry. When leadership — both on the business side and the technology side — are committed to transformation, modernization initiatives go beyond technology upgrades and impact the whole business approach. She notes that machine learning and AI offer new opportunities for customers in the retail sector to change their approach to capturing and managing data, or even offer new avenues for monetizing custom-built solutions across the industry.

When it comes to Azure, Mariya explains that the platform brings together a suite of capabilities to enhance the business experience for customers in the retail sector. She explains that Azure is able to enhance the consumer goods industry in four key ways:

Establishing a productive and flexible environment for developers to innovate

Implementing a hybrid cloud to ease the transition to the cloud

Offering an intelligent suite of data tools, including cognitive services and machine learning

Providing a trusted solution that complies with the privacy and security needs of customers

We also discuss edge computing and the importance of a hybrid model for retail scenarios such as point-of-sale. In many cases, Mariya clarifies that a combination of cloud and on-prem ensures employees are able to best serve customers in real-time.

As for partners looking to engage here, Mariya shares some of the feedback she’s heard from Azure partners working in the retail space. In particular, Microsoft’s “build with” approach helps partners build their technical expertise. She also highlights Microsoft’s commitment to nurturing the synergies between customers and partners with specific solutions for unique use cases or industry pain points.

]]>https://ultimateguidetopartnering.com/2018/07/02/54-practical-digital-transformation-in-retail-and-consumer-goods/feed/0Industry Experiences: Practical Digital Transformation in Retail and Consumer Goods, with Mariya Zorotovich. - In this series of the podcasts I sit down with industry leaders to explore the digital transformation disrupting almost every industry. - Industry Experiences: Practical Digital Transformation in Retail and Consumer Goods, with Mariya Zorotovich. - In this series of the podcasts I sit down with industry leaders to explore the digital transformation disrupting almost every industry.<br />
<br />
In this episode I was delighted to spend time with Mariya Zorotovich, Worldwide Industry Lead for Azure Retail and Consumer Goods at Microsoft. Mariya is a translator between the retail and consumer goods customer needs related to innovation and modernization of vertical capabilities and Microsoft’s technology agenda related to Azure cloud and AI technology. In this role, she articulates the benefits of Azure’s robust toolset to customers to address the unique business concerns and evolving demands of the retail and consumer goods industry.<br />
<br />
As brick-and-mortar commerce melds with the digital world, the capabilities of Azure provide retailers with a set of powerful new tools, including advanced analytics, AI and machine learning. These new capabilities serve the organizations themselves, as well as improve the overall customer experience from sales to operations. According to Mariya, adoption of these technologies is expanding rapidly as companies who are “first to market” are seeing improved ROI for their organizations.<br />
<br />
We discuss disruption in the retail and consumer goods industry, stemming from companies that are using non-traditional approaches to retail scenarios. Today, organizations are using intelligent technologies to build platforms and communities as a model for trade. Mariya recommends a practical approach to helping more traditional organizations truly transform in order to compete as this industry evolves.<br />
<br />
Mariya sees a variety of technologies supporting unified commerce and consumer engagement. Machine learning and advanced analytics are particularly useful for retailers grappling with how to handle the large amounts of data gathered from the supply chain and from customers.<br />
<br />
Mariya peels back on AI in particular. AI technology spurs some interesting trends for a variety of scenarios in commerce, including:<br />
<br />
Price intelligence<br />
Deriving insights from customer behavior and sentiment<br />
Optimizing inventory<br />
Innovative check-out scenarios<br />
<br />
Mariya emphasizes that while retailers are intently focused on optimizing the customer experience on the front end, they need to equally focus on enhancing the capabilities of the organization on the back end, from fulfillment through the supply chain.<br />
<br />
Mariya and I discuss the importance of leadership in transformation scenarios in the retail industry. When leadership — both on the business side and the technology side — are committed to transformation, modernization initiatives go beyond technology upgrades and impact the whole business approach. She notes that machine learning and AI offer new opportunities for customers in the retail sector to change their approach to capturing and managing data, or even offer new avenues for monetizing custom-built solutions across the industry.<br />
<br />
When it comes to Azure, Mariya explains that the platform brings together a suite of capabilities to enhance the business experience for customers in the retail sector. She explains that Azure is able to enhance the consumer goods industry in four key ways:<br />
<br />
Establishing a productive and flexible environment for developers to innovate<br />
Implementing a hybrid cloud to ease the transition to the cloud<br />
Offering an intelligent suite of data tools, including cognitive services and machine learning<br />
Providing a trusted solution that complies with the privacy and security needs of customers<br />
<br />
We also discuss edge computing and the importance of a hybrid model for retail scenarios such as point-of-sale. In many cases,Vince Menzione - Technology Industry Sales and Partner Executiveclean28:44
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# 53 – Unlocking Banking Through Cloud and Edge Solutionshttps://ultimateguidetopartnering.com/2018/06/29/53-unlocking-banking-through-cloud-and-edge-solutions/
https://ultimateguidetopartnering.com/2018/06/29/53-unlocking-banking-through-cloud-and-edge-solutions/#respondFri, 29 Jun 2018 11:59:18 +0000https://ultimateguidetopartnering.com/?p=1473 Industry Experiences: Unlocking Banking Through Cloud and Edge Solutions with Howard Bush. In this series of the podcast, I sit down with industry leaders to explore the digital transformation disrupting almost every industry In this episode I am excited to speak with Howard Bush, Principle Industry Lead for Azure for Banking and Capital Markets … Continue reading "# 53 – Unlocking Banking Through Cloud and Edge Solutions"

In this series of the podcast, I sit down with industry leaders to explore the digital transformation disrupting almost every industry

In this episode I am excited to speak with Howard Bush, Principle Industry Lead for Azure for Banking and Capital Markets at Microsoft. In his role, Howard is the advocate for Microsoft Azure within the banking and capital markets industry. Howard works with customers in this sector to help them understand how cloud computing addresses the unique and changing needs of the industry.

Howard, who describes himself as “a banker wrapped in IT clothing,” discusses the shifting landscape for traditional banking models, from lending and advising to payments and deposits. These legacy models are being challenged by new innovations and FinTechs that put digital and mobile experiences at the forefront. According to Howard, this forces traditional institutions to rethink their role in the value chain and banks are exploring ways to innovate.

Howard points out that over the past several years, the adoption rate of cloud technologies in the banking and capital markets sector has been relatively slow. Security is a primary concern for customers in this industry in order to protect the personal information at the heart of the business. In addition to security concerns, customers in banking and capital markets must also comply with regulatory requirements, such as the recently implemented GDPR initiative in Europe. For this reason, hybrid solutions have been the preferred choice for customers in this sector.

Howard and I discuss several cloud technologies that are growing in popularity for the banking and capital markets industry. Specifically, Howard sees an uptick in AI as a way to utilize the large amounts of data gathered by the industry. Using automation and analytics, organizations can gain new insights to offer customized or personalized services to their customers. AI also helps regulators monitor the capital adequacy of institutions to ensure compliance and gauge risk.

Blockchain and digital ledgers are also driving transformation for banks and capital markets. Howard points out that where branches used to be the only location for certain transactions, smart contracts can replace the legacy methods of trade finance in some cases. While this model is still new for banks, Howard expects that the high speed and low cost offered by blockchain will become more common.

Fraud prevention and detection is another area where Howard sees intelligent technology supporting the industry. Biometrics can be combined with sophisticated algorithms and AI to monitor the behavior of customers to then verify their identity and spot imposters. Trends can also be tracked to predict spending and identify anomalies to better protect customers.

Howard peels back on the idea of open banking, in which traditional banking companies are leveraging the capabilities and innovation of FinTechs. Using open APIs, information can be accessed from the historically closed system of the banks. According to Howard, this model will support “a consortium of capabilities and services,” building a network of people who either have or need capital while still protecting critical personal data. This means banks could not only supply financial services, but also support customers with related needs such as tax services, business opportunities, or operations.

We dig into some of the specific features of the Azure platform that support “intelligent banking” such as big data, advanced analytics and AI. Together, on the Azure platform, Howard explains organizations are empowered to:

Create a 360 view of the customer

Enable real time payments to meet consumer and regulatory demands

Visualize and act on data to create a comprehensive risk model

Detect and prevent fraudulent transactions

Howard points out that Azure’s hybrid capability allows customers in the banking and capital markets industry to connect to legacy systems that contain their customer data. This means that while data is still secured on-prem, banks can still take advantage of the flexibility and power of cloud tools.

Finally, we discuss some of the benefits for partners that want to join the Azure partner network. Microsoft provides partners with customer relationships and insights, as well as supports partners that want to build industry-specific solutions on the flexible and powerful Azure platform.

]]>https://ultimateguidetopartnering.com/2018/06/29/53-unlocking-banking-through-cloud-and-edge-solutions/feed/0 - Industry Experiences: Unlocking Banking Through Cloud and Edge Solutions with Howard Bush. - In this series of the podcast, I sit down with industry leaders to explore the digital transformation disrupting almost every industry - <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Industry Experiences: Unlocking Banking Through Cloud and Edge Solutions with Howard Bush.<br />
<br />
In this series of the podcast, I sit down with industry leaders to explore the digital transformation disrupting almost every industry<br />
<br />
In this episode I am excited to speak with Howard Bush, Principle Industry Lead for Azure for Banking and Capital Markets at Microsoft. In his role, Howard is the advocate for Microsoft Azure within the banking and capital markets industry. Howard works with customers in this sector to help them understand how cloud computing addresses the unique and changing needs of the industry.<br />
<br />
Howard, who describes himself as “a banker wrapped in IT clothing,” discusses the shifting landscape for traditional banking models, from lending and advising to payments and deposits. These legacy models are being challenged by new innovations and FinTechs that put digital and mobile experiences at the forefront. According to Howard, this forces traditional institutions to rethink their role in the value chain and banks are exploring ways to innovate.<br />
<br />
Howard points out that over the past several years, the adoption rate of cloud technologies in the banking and capital markets sector has been relatively slow. Security is a primary concern for customers in this industry in order to protect the personal information at the heart of the business. In addition to security concerns, customers in banking and capital markets must also comply with regulatory requirements, such as the recently implemented GDPR initiative in Europe. For this reason, hybrid solutions have been the preferred choice for customers in this sector.<br />
<br />
Howard and I discuss several cloud technologies that are growing in popularity for the banking and capital markets industry. Specifically, Howard sees an uptick in AI as a way to utilize the large amounts of data gathered by the industry. Using automation and analytics, organizations can gain new insights to offer customized or personalized services to their customers. AI also helps regulators monitor the capital adequacy of institutions to ensure compliance and gauge risk.<br />
<br />
Blockchain and digital ledgers are also driving transformation for banks and capital markets. Howard points out that where branches used to be the only location for certain transactions, smart contracts can replace the legacy methods of trade finance in some cases. While this model is still new for banks, Howard expects that the high speed and low cost offered by blockchain will become more common.<br />
<br />
Fraud prevention and detection is another area where Howard sees intelligent technology supporting the industry. Biometrics can be combined with sophisticated algorithms and AI to monitor the behavior of customers to then verify their identity and spot imposters. Trends can also be tracked to predict spending and identify anomalies to better protect customers.<br />
<br />
Howard peels back on the idea of open banking, in which traditional banking companies are leveraging the capabilities and innovation of FinTechs. Using open APIs, information can be accessed from the historically closed system of the banks. According to Howard, this model will support “a consortium of capabilities and services,” building a network of people who either have or need capital while still protecting critical personal data. This means banks could not only supply financial services, but also support customers with related needs such as tax services, business opportunities, or operations.<br />
<br />
We dig into some of the specific features of the Azure platform that support “intelligent banking” such as big data, advanced analytics and AI. Together, on the Azure platform, Howard explains organizations are empowered to:<br />
<br />
Create a 360 view of the customer<br />
Enable real time payments to meet consumer and regulat...Vince Menzione - Technology Industry Sales and Partner Executiveclean26:01
<iframe src="https://player.blubrry.com/?media_url=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.blubrry.com%2Funofficalguidetopartnering%2Fcontent.blubrry.com%2Funofficalguidetopartnering%2FHoward-Combined_Episode-w-o-clip.mp3&amp;podcast_link=https%3A%2F%2Fultimateguidetopartnering.com%2F2018%2F06%2F29%2F53-unlocking-banking-through-cloud-and-edge-solutions%2F" scrolling="no" width="100%" height="138px" frameborder="0" id="blubrryplayer-8"></iframe>
#52 – Exciting Advances in Healthcare Technology Improving Outcomeshttps://ultimateguidetopartnering.com/2018/06/27/52-exciting-advances-in-healthcare-technology-improving-outcomes/
https://ultimateguidetopartnering.com/2018/06/27/52-exciting-advances-in-healthcare-technology-improving-outcomes/#respondWed, 27 Jun 2018 22:19:29 +0000https://ultimateguidetopartnering.com/?p=1476Industry Experiences: Exciting Advances in Healthcare Technology to Improve Outcomes with David Houlding. In this series of the podcast, I sit down with industry leaders to explore the digital transformation disrupting almost every industry. In this episode, I was lucky enough to talk with David Houlding, Principle Healthcare Program Manager for Azure at Microsoft. … Continue reading "#52 – Exciting Advances in Healthcare Technology Improving Outcomes"

Industry Experiences: Exciting Advances in Healthcare Technology to Improve Outcomes with David Houlding.

In this series of the podcast, I sit down with industry leaders to explore the digital transformation disrupting almost every industry.

In this episode, I was lucky enough to talk with David Houlding, Principle Healthcare Program Manager for Azure at Microsoft. David supports the healthcare industry by embracing the power of the cloud to provide better care for patients. From hospitals and insurers to pharmaceuticals and researchers, David links the industry to Microsoft technology to empower the healthcare industry and anticipate the healthcare needs of the future.

Healthcare is a complex industry with many different factors contributing to success. One of those “puzzle pieces,” as David calls them, is technology. Today’s healthcare industry uses cloud technology to address a variety of unique business problems, such as reducing costs and improving patient outcomes. According to David, AI, machine learning, blockchain and IoMT (internet of medical things) can all contribute to the industry’s mission while maintaining compliance with data security and privacy regulations.

David shares some of the technology trends he’s seen throughout the healthcare industry. In particular, he highlights:

AI and machine learning for diagnostic imaging

Virtual reality being applied to patient engagement and staff training

These transformations are happening concurrently, resulting in rapid innovation and modernization in the healthcare industry.

David peels back on IoMT specifically, explaining the impact this will have on diagnosis and care. From wearables to connected MRI machines, these tools can better monitor patient health and feed advanced analytics tools to improve outcomes.

David and I discuss the immense opportunity provided by 5G. In rural areas that are still without high speed internet, 5G WAN will enable these communities to access improved healthcare anyway. In addition to levelling the playing field when it comes to internet access, 5G will also enable better healthcare services and patient engagement in traditionally underserved regions.

We then dive into blockchain’s applications for the healthcare industry. David sees blockchain as a channel for healthcare providers to establish a collaborative network to unlock knowledge sharing. By sharing limited amounts of data in a targeted and secure healthcare blockchain, organizations can better meet business goals and improve patient care. David gives a few examples, including:

Pharmaceutical supply chains to verify the authenticity of medications

Provider and payer “clearinghouses” to determine eligibility

With blockchain, the information and actions occurring within the healthcare network can happen in real time, reducing the time and costs associated with traditional methods of collaboration and information sharing. David and his team are actively testing some of these use cases to refine the value of blockchain in the healthcare industry. He also dives into Azure’s Blockchain Workbench, which allows rapid prototyping of the technology. Customers can easily define the parameters, add data and test the blockchain environment in a centralized and secure manner.

David also shares the enormous growth happening in healthcare AI. Using AI, thousands of medical images can be processed and analysed, saving time for doctors, allowing them to focus more on patient care and enabling them to triage patients in near real time. This information can then connect to the blockchain to share learnings with the healthcare consortium. We also discuss how AI and machine learning can safeguard medical networks against malicious attacks, such as ransomware, by quickly detecting anomalies and isolating devices to avoid infecting the entire network.

David explains why customers and partners should explore engagement with Azure. From security compliance to hybrid deployment to the flexibility of the platform, Azure provides a holistic solution for addressing the specific needs of the healthcare industry. There’s also a lot of opportunity for partners in terms of hosting solutions in the cloud and building on the Azure platform.

]]>https://ultimateguidetopartnering.com/2018/06/27/52-exciting-advances-in-healthcare-technology-improving-outcomes/feed/0Industry Experiences: Exciting Advances in Healthcare Technology to Improve Outcomes with David Houlding. - In this series of the podcast, I sit down with industry leaders to explore the digital transformation disrupting almost every industry. - Industry Experiences: Exciting Advances in Healthcare Technology to Improve Outcomes with David Houlding. <br />
<br />
In this series of the podcast, I sit down with industry leaders to explore the digital transformation disrupting almost every industry.<br />
<br />
In this episode, I was lucky enough to talk with David Houlding, Principle Healthcare Program Manager for Azure at Microsoft. David supports the healthcare industry by embracing the power of the cloud to provide better care for patients. From hospitals and insurers to pharmaceuticals and researchers, David links the industry to Microsoft technology to empower the healthcare industry and anticipate the healthcare needs of the future.<br />
<br />
Healthcare is a complex industry with many different factors contributing to success. One of those “puzzle pieces,” as David calls them, is technology. Today’s healthcare industry uses cloud technology to address a variety of unique business problems, such as reducing costs and improving patient outcomes. According to David, AI, machine learning, blockchain and IoMT (internet of medical things) can all contribute to the industry’s mission while maintaining compliance with data security and privacy regulations.<br />
<br />
David shares some of the technology trends he’s seen throughout the healthcare industry. In particular, he highlights:<br />
<br />
AI and machine learning for diagnostic imaging<br />
Virtual reality being applied to patient engagement and staff training<br />
Blockchain to enable collaboration between healthcare organizations<br />
IoMT (internet of medical things) to gather unprecedented amounts of data<br />
5G wireless to enable new connected technologies and reducing latency<br />
<br />
These transformations are happening concurrently, resulting in rapid innovation and modernization in the healthcare industry.<br />
<br />
David peels back on IoMT specifically, explaining the impact this will have on diagnosis and care. From wearables to connected MRI machines, these tools can better monitor patient health and feed advanced analytics tools to improve outcomes.<br />
<br />
David and I discuss the immense opportunity provided by 5G. In rural areas that are still without high speed internet, 5G WAN will enable these communities to access improved healthcare anyway. In addition to levelling the playing field when it comes to internet access, 5G will also enable better healthcare services and patient engagement in traditionally underserved regions.<br />
<br />
We then dive into blockchain’s applications for the healthcare industry. David sees blockchain as a channel for healthcare providers to establish a collaborative network to unlock knowledge sharing. By sharing limited amounts of data in a targeted and secure healthcare blockchain, organizations can better meet business goals and improve patient care. David gives a few examples, including:<br />
<br />
Doctor credentialing to reduce redundancy across affiliated organizations<br />
Medical device tracking to determine when maintenance is required<br />
Pharmaceutical supply chains to verify the authenticity of medications<br />
Provider and payer “clearinghouses” to determine eligibility<br />
<br />
With blockchain, the information and actions occurring within the healthcare network can happen in real time, reducing the time and costs associated with traditional methods of collaboration and information sharing. David and his team are actively testing some of these use cases to refine the value of blockchain in the healthcare industry. He also dives into Azure’s Blockchain Workbench, which allows rapid prototyping of the technology. Customers can easily define the parameters, add data and test the blockchain environment in a centralized and secure manner.<br />
<br />
David also shares the enormous growth happening in healthcare AI. Using AI, thousands of medical images can be processed and a...Vince Menzione - Technology Industry Sales and Partner Executiveclean39:08
<iframe src="https://player.blubrry.com/?media_url=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.blubrry.com%2Funofficalguidetopartnering%2Fcontent.blubrry.com%2Funofficalguidetopartnering%2FDavid_Combined_Episode_w-o-clip.mp3&amp;podcast_link=https%3A%2F%2Fultimateguidetopartnering.com%2F2018%2F06%2F27%2F52-exciting-advances-in-healthcare-technology-improving-outcomes%2F" scrolling="no" width="100%" height="138px" frameborder="0" id="blubrryplayer-9"></iframe>
#51 – An Amazing Opportunity with Industry Revealing Cloud Technologyhttps://ultimateguidetopartnering.com/2018/06/25/51-an-amazing-opportunity-with-industry-revealing-cloud-technology/
https://ultimateguidetopartnering.com/2018/06/25/51-an-amazing-opportunity-with-industry-revealing-cloud-technology/#respondTue, 26 Jun 2018 00:15:46 +0000https://ultimateguidetopartnering.com/?p=1491Industry Experiences: An Amazing Opportunity with Industry Revealing Cloud Technology. In this series of the podcast, I sit down with industry leaders to explore the digital transformation disrupting almost every industry In this episode I had the great pleasure of speaking with Paul Maher, General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. As part … Continue reading "#51 – An Amazing Opportunity with Industry Revealing Cloud Technology"

In this series of the podcast, I sit down with industry leaders to explore the digital transformation disrupting almost every industry

In this episode I had the great pleasure of speaking with Paul Maher, General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. As part of the Cloud and AI Engineering organization at Microsoft, Paul leads a team of industry experts that link vertical industries with Azure engineers to address current and future cloud computing needs for sectors such as:

Insurance

Manufacturing

Retail

Banking and capital markets

Healthcare

With Microsoft’s renewed commitment to an industry approach, Paul helped build the new Industry Experiences team from the ground up. By sitting within the engineering practice, he and his multidiscipline team have direct lines to the Azure technologists, as well as customers experiencing digital transformation first-hand. Paul notes that this signals that Microsoft is striving to be more than a best-of-breed technology company — it is a true industry partner.

We discuss the “feedback loop” function of the Industry Experiences team. Internally, Paul explains that his team represents industry needs and concerns, and provides insights to the engineering function for roadmap and planning for Azure development. Externally, the team uses technical knowledge to engage with industry leaders by sharing knowledge and insights as organizations move to the cloud. Really, Paul sees his team as the “eyes and ears” of the industry from IT infrastructure, to decision-makers at the early phases of digital transformation, to partners building solutions for vertical industries on the Azure platform.

Paul shares a bit about his professional journey and how his current role brings together several areas of interest and expertise. An experienced software developer, Paul built a cloud infrastructure for a financial services company and brings some of those key learnings into his role at Microsoft. In particular, Paul highlights:

Clarifying the business motivations for moving to the cloud

Understanding the benefits that the cloud offers

Embracing the efficiency, scale and innovation provided by cloud solutions

Shifting to an agile, continuous delivery approach to development

Collaborating with experienced developers and learning from those projects

Building a strategy for managing and supporting the cloud solution post-deployment

Paul also emphasizes the need to upskill existing team members as needed, and bringing in people with experience that can help.

We discuss the acceleration of cloud adoption across industry. Paul attributes this to the maturity of the Azure cloud platform and its proven capabilities, along with the software and hardware that accompanies it. Paul also sees existing cloud adoption as a confidence boost and competitive edge for businesses in the initial phases of digital transformation. He also points to evolving industry needs around increased data, tighter budgets and the next generation of the workforce. With this in mind, cloud-based tools such as big data, AI, and blockchain are coming together to do more than ever before at a more affordable price point.

According to Paul, his team is uniquely positioned to meet the needs of industry. Microsoft has a rich history of partnerships, so using this model to work with vertical industries is a natural progression of that legacy. He also points to the pedigree of the Azure engineering team to deliver value to customers quickly. Feedback from customers and partners is also a key benefit, and Paul points to public betas as an example. Combine all that with Microsoft’s commitment to developers, and Azure is well on its way to becoming the platform of choice for customers in any sector.

]]>https://ultimateguidetopartnering.com/2018/06/25/51-an-amazing-opportunity-with-industry-revealing-cloud-technology/feed/0Industry Experiences: An Amazing Opportunity with Industry Revealing Cloud Technology. - In this series of the podcast, I sit down with industry leaders to explore the digital transformation disrupting almost every industry - Industry Experiences: An Amazing Opportunity with Industry Revealing Cloud Technology.<br />
<br />
In this series of the podcast, I sit down with industry leaders to explore the digital transformation disrupting almost every industry<br />
<br />
In this episode I had the great pleasure of speaking with Paul Maher, General Manager of the Industry Experiences Team at Microsoft. As part of the Cloud and AI Engineering organization at Microsoft, Paul leads a team of industry experts that link vertical industries with Azure engineers to address current and future cloud computing needs for sectors such as:<br />
<br />
Insurance<br />
Manufacturing<br />
Retail<br />
Banking and capital markets<br />
Healthcare<br />
<br />
With Microsoft’s renewed commitment to an industry approach, Paul helped build the new Industry Experiences team from the ground up. By sitting within the engineering practice, he and his multidiscipline team have direct lines to the Azure technologists, as well as customers experiencing digital transformation first-hand. Paul notes that this signals that Microsoft is striving to be more than a best-of-breed technology company — it is a true industry partner.<br />
<br />
We discuss the “feedback loop” function of the Industry Experiences team. Internally, Paul explains that his team represents industry needs and concerns, and provides insights to the engineering function for roadmap and planning for Azure development. Externally, the team uses technical knowledge to engage with industry leaders by sharing knowledge and insights as organizations move to the cloud. Really, Paul sees his team as the “eyes and ears” of the industry from IT infrastructure, to decision-makers at the early phases of digital transformation, to partners building solutions for vertical industries on the Azure platform.<br />
<br />
Paul shares a bit about his professional journey and how his current role brings together several areas of interest and expertise. An experienced software developer, Paul built a cloud infrastructure for a financial services company and brings some of those key learnings into his role at Microsoft. In particular, Paul highlights:<br />
<br />
Clarifying the business motivations for moving to the cloud<br />
Understanding the benefits that the cloud offers<br />
Embracing the efficiency, scale and innovation provided by cloud solutions<br />
Shifting to an agile, continuous delivery approach to development<br />
Collaborating with experienced developers and learning from those projects<br />
Building a strategy for managing and supporting the cloud solution post-deployment<br />
<br />
Paul also emphasizes the need to upskill existing team members as needed, and bringing in people with experience that can help.<br />
<br />
We discuss the acceleration of cloud adoption across industry. Paul attributes this to the maturity of the Azure cloud platform and its proven capabilities, along with the software and hardware that accompanies it. Paul also sees existing cloud adoption as a confidence boost and competitive edge for businesses in the initial phases of digital transformation. He also points to evolving industry needs around increased data, tighter budgets and the next generation of the workforce. With this in mind, cloud-based tools such as big data, AI, and blockchain are coming together to do more than ever before at a more affordable price point.<br />
<br />
According to Paul, his team is uniquely positioned to meet the needs of industry. Microsoft has a rich history of partnerships, so using this model to work with vertical industries is a natural progression of that legacy. He also points to the pedigree of the Azure engineering team to deliver value to customers quickly. Feedback from customers and partners is also a key benefit, and Paul points to public betas as an example. Combine all that with Microsoft’s commitment to developers,Vince Menzione - Technology Industry Sales and Partner Executiveclean34:05
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